Now that our two Schnauzers have passed, our daughter, Madi, is kind enough to loan us Kobe, her Golden Doodle, occasionally. He’s a lovable boy we’ve come to think of as our therapy dog. His gentle mannerisms help soothe our lingering grief over Max and Baylor, and having a dog in the house again — even a borrowed one — has its own unspoken mercy.
When I walk Kobe, I let him take his time. I pause while he sniffs his way down the block, because I’ve read that smell is a treat for dogs the way a good meal is for us. A dog’s nose has upward of 300 million scent receptors, compared to our paltry six million. Where I see a driveway, Kobe reads a newspaper — every blade of grass a headline, every mailbox a byline from the neighborhood’s pets’ comings and goings.
But I should have known better than to walk Kobe Tuesday morning. Trash day.
It’s one thing to stop and “smell the roses,” or at least, for Kobe, the roses’ more pedestrian cousin, the grass. But trash day invites him to an entirely different level of curiosity. He investigates every can and bag with the seriousness of a trained FBI canine sniffing for a criminal’s DNA. Our fifteen-minute walk threatens to become an all-morning stakeout unless I physically tug him along. He likes the scent of what other creatures have left on God’s good earth — that much I understand. But garbage is something else to him. It’s less an interest than an addiction.
I’d like to think of myself as a connoisseur of the good, the true, and the beautiful. I cherish my books, a good conversation with a friend, something on the internet that actually deepens my understanding rather than just fills the time. Most of all, I’m drawn to the quiet of private meditation, the kind that clears rather than clutters the mind.
But if I’m honest, I can be a lot like Kobe on trash day. I get tugged toward other people’s garbage too — some juicy bit of gossip, another mindless hour of television, a headline intended to outrage rather than inform. I’m not above nosing around in places I have no business being.
Solomon saw this tendency clearly enough to write it down three thousand years ago: “A wise person is hungry for knowledge, while a fool feeds on trash” (Proverbs 15:14, NLT). Folly, like trash, has a smell — and something in our fallen nature finds it strangely appealing.
It starts in the mind, so I have to deliberately divorce myself from trash-thinking: “self-pity, dishonest, or self-seeking motives,” as the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous describes it. Paul, the Apostle, offers us a healthy diet: “Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise” (Philippians 4:8, NLT). It’s a short list, and none of it comes from the curb.
C.S. Lewis once observed that we’re far too easily satisfied with the lesser: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
I think that’s my trash-day problem exactly. I don’t need more willpower so much as a better nose — one retrained, upon the Spirit’s daily renewing—to prefer the fragrance of Christ over the stench of folly, however entertaining folly smells at first sniff.
Kobe will keep nosing through the neighbor’s trash, no doubt. He’s a good dog, but he’ll always have a dog’s nose for dog smells — that’s simply his nature.
I’m a different sort of creature. As one of God’s redeemed, I have a better nose available to me. I’m working on using it.