• Ginger Ruth the Wonder Dog - January 8, 2026

    Ginger Ruth is a good dog. She is very smart and very sweet. We got her from the Jarrell dog rescue, so we never found out exactly what breeds she is, but we figure there’s some bird dog in there, since she loves to retrieve. Which when we got her was a good thing, since we had just lost our old lab, Piper (who was a great retriever).


    So, I decided to train Ginger to retrieve. And she seemed pretty good at it. Like I said, she’s very smart and she’s got a reasonable amount of natural drive, so the training was going well. Until it wasn’t.


    We were working on what I thought was a pretty simple drill. It wasn’t any more complicated than the ones we had done the several days before. But Ginger couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. Now dogs her age—she was a “teenager”—sometimes don’t do stuff just so they can get under your skin. But that’s not what was going on. It was apparent that she just didn’t get it. She wasn’t doing what I wanted and I was getting frustrated. I kept trying to get her to do the drill. I argued with her, reasoned with her, explained it to her, but she still didn’t get it. So finally, I started to get angry. How could she be so stupid? How could she be so dense?

    Then I stopped and thought. Was it her or was it me? Any of you who have trained animals know that it’s a progression. You build on the prior steps and you move your way up to more complicated things gradually. It’s really no different than how we learn. You don’t start kids out with algebra. You work your way up to it. So, was it that she was dumb, or was it that I hadn’t given her everything she needed to succeed?


    So, I decided to back up. We went back over some of the basics that I might have gone through a little too quickly in our (my) effort to make her “Ginger the Wonder Dog.”


    All that was several years ago and I would love to say Ginger Ruth became a world-class retriever. But alas, no. She’s actually very good at getting the birds, it’s just that when she gets them, the border collie in her takes over so that when she returns with the bird, it is “tenderized” beyond recognition.


    Nevertheless, Ginger might have something to say to all of us (or at least to me). Like I said, she’s pretty smart. St. Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.” The whole aim of our existence is to become transformed more and more into the image of Christ—to live in God’s perfect love. This isn’t a physical transformation; it’s in the mind and the spirit. And God has given us a means of accomplishing that transformation through God’s Word, the Bible.


    But for that transformation to happen, we’ve got to study the Word. We’ve got to dig into it. We’ve got to seek to understand it. We’re not going to jump immediately from being “born again” to spiritual maturity any more than a child is going to learn algebra before mastering addition, or any more than Ginger Ruth is going to learn how to do a water retrieve before learning how to swim. It’s just not gonna happen.