Dog ate Rat Poison!

James had to go to a house where a lady had mixed some porridge and rat poison together because she had seen a rat in an alley and was trying to get rid of it. She got a visitor while she was mixing the rat poison, and left the room to talk to the visitor, to come back to find that the house dog had eaten the rat poison thinking it a strange tasting but good meal. The dog was resting contently after eating the rats meal.
The dog was unaware that he was about to die a horrible death because he ate that meal.

To James it was obvious that the dog was not going to like being forced to vomit the poison out.
To the dog it was a nice meal. He was completely unaware of the danger that he was in.

Now James got some mustard which he watered down and grabbed the dog roughly and rushed him outside. He roughly put the dog between his knees and fed the mustard into the dogs mouth – this had to be done fast to induce vomiting so James was rushing the job and being rough while he did it, he had no other choice if he was going to save the life of the dog. He had to force the dogs mouth open. The dog was held as if in a vice and could do nothing about the meal fed to him. The dog was not happy, but it worked and the dog vomited all the poison up.

It reminded me of us when God rescues us or helps us and so many of us with broken bones or such blame God for it all, or flat-out refuse to believe in God because “A loving God would never have allowed such a thing to happen…”
God sees our actions and the foolish things that we are undertaking that will cause much suffering and downfall for us and even possibly much shame. But like the dog we can be weak, insecure and hurtful. We can make false accusations to God and build up our own confidence on false feelings of justification for our pain and suffering (which is much less than it would have been had God not stepped in and saved us).

The father runs as hard as he can and as they both meet at the cliff the parent shoulder charges the child and the child is stopped at the cliff edge , he hits the ground very hard.
Now hurt, with possibly a broken shoulder, or arm, or broken or bruised ribs the child is shocked, crying and hurt until the parent points out the cliff and its long drop to death or at least much more damaged than from the shoulder charge.
Now the child wisely understands his own foolishness and is very forgiving even though hurt.
Are we wise enough to look back and see if we were going astray in the past and something happened to bring us back to God?

If you were the poisoned dog and God was James Herriot you would now hate God because you didn’t understand the situation. Like the dog nipping at James Harriot’s ankle with resentments and anger we could be taking nips at God and hurting God deeply, and all God was trying to do was trying to help or save us from a bad situation or save our life or even steer us (like the cliff boy) away from a major disaster in our life.