I’m on an island at a busy intersection
I can’t go forward. I can’t turn back
Can’t see the future
It’s getting away from me
I just watch the taillights glowing
One step closer to knowing
One step closer to knowing
– U2’s Bono

This has turned into Blitzen’s week, so I thought it appropriate to finish it with a piece I wrote when he was a little over a year old. This fear he has of invisible barriers has been with him all along. I have similar issues that refuse to go away. It helps to be reminded that the barrier is only in my head. I might add that I have known Blitzen to blow right through these imaginary barriers when his mind is on something else.

We have a little twelve-pound Chihuahua that was my wife’s Christmas present a year ago. I grimaced when I found out, a few days before Christmas, that this was what she really wanted. I was of the persuasion that real dogs are supposed to be big, but I now have to admit, this little addition to our family has brought us much joy and has become a source of boundless entertainment. Not hurting for personality, he prances about with an air of respectability that makes you not want to embarrass him by laughing in his face until you remember he is a dog and probably won’t take it personally. He has a little wrinkled brow that provides a serious addition to the humor of his antics. We called him Blitzen because we heard he was a reindeer-head Chihuahua and he came to us at Christmastime, but Reepicheep, the serious little mouse in the Chronicles of Narnia would also suit his character well.

Lately, Blitzen has taken to exhibiting a strange behavior that has him refusing to come in the front door, as if some invisible force is preventing him from entering the house. It works the same way going out. He will stop short of the door and no amount of coaxing will get him across the threshold. We have to pick him up and carry him.

It’s both comical and pathetic to watch him sitting there whining and shaking with desire to cross, but completely unable to overcome whatever unseen barrier it is that he imagines. You can get down on your hands and knees as little as two feet away, and beg him to come to you, but he won’t. Perhaps some bad experience — whether getting caught in the door or slipping on the floor just inside — has become frozen in his memory, but he cannot shake it.

I am convinced God has given us pets to see the silly things we do, and in this case, I can’t help but see my own fears when he does this. What are those thresholds in my life that I can’t cross because of some imaginary fear or bad experience from the past that haunts me? More often than not, our fears are just like this — invisible barriers to faith that keep us from moving on in our lives. Satan is a real force, and he can set difficult things in our paths, but I rather think that most of the time he locks us up in the smoke and mirrors of our imaginations.

If Blitzen would just take one step out, he would find there is nothing to fear, and not only that, there are strong, loving hands waiting for him on the other side. In such situations, our moving ahead in faith (and finding the same results, I might add) isn’t any more complicated than that.