I Do Not Like Him Very Much Today

You are not supposed to think it, which is why it arrives with so much shame attached.

The thought is simple. Today, this animal is hard work, and I do not like him very much, and there was a moment this week when I thought about what life would be like without him and the thought was not entirely unpleasant.

And then, immediately, the shame. Because he did not ask for any of this, and because you took him on, and because a good person would not think that.

I want to say two things about that. The first is that almost everybody who has ever had a difficult animal has thought it. The second is that thinking it has almost nothing to do with whether you are going to keep looking after him, and the two have got welded together in your head in a way that is costing you more than the animal is.

The whole thing is groaning

There is a verse in Romans that I think is one of the most useful sentences in Scripture for anybody living with something difficult.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. (Romans 8:22, King James Version)

The whole creation. Groaning.

That is not a poetic flourish about human sadness. Paul is describing the actual state of the created order: strained, not working the way it was made to work, audibly under pressure, and waiting.

And your animal is inside that. So are you. So is the situation between you.

Which means the difficulty you are having is not a report on your competence and it is not a report on his character. It is what living inside a groaning creation feels like on a Tuesday, and Romans 8:22 says so in the plainest possible terms, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that take the personal sting out of an ordinary hard week.

You are living inside something that is straining, and the difficulty has never once been a verdict on you. Romans 8:22 puts the whole creation under pressure and waiting rather than functioning smoothly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a hard week out of the category of personal failure.

Nothing here is training advice

I want to be clear about what this site does not do, and this is the article where it matters most.

I am not going to tell you anything about your animal's behavior. Not a method, not a technique, not an explanation of why he does it. I am not qualified, and a page that starts explaining an animal it has never met is doing something irresponsible.

If the behavior is a problem, that goes to somebody who works with animals for a living, and that is a good and normal thing to do rather than an admission of anything.

What I am dealing with is the thing nobody helps with, which is the private guilt of finding it hard, and Romans 8:22 is about the condition rather than the technique, and the Holy Spirit deals with people rather than with methods.

You are allowed to get help with the practical part, and needing it has never once meant you failed him. The written word describes the whole created order as strained rather than as working, and the Spirit of God is the one who addresses the person while somebody qualified addresses the problem.

Feeling and doing are not the same

Here is the piece I actually want to hand you, and Romans 8:22 is underneath it, and so is the patience of the Holy Spirit with people who are waiting rather than arriving.

You have quietly assumed that if you stop feeling warm toward something, you have stopped loving it, and that continuing to look after it while not feeling warm is a kind of dishonesty.

That is not true and almost nothing in life works that way.

What you do for him has been completely unaffected by how you feel about him. He has been fed on the days you were charmed and on the days you were not. That is not hypocrisy. That is what commitment looks like from the inside, and from the outside it just looks like an animal being looked after.

The feeling will come back. It usually does, and it usually comes back for no reason on an ordinary afternoon. And in the meantime the doing is the love, and Romans 8:22 puts everybody in a season of waiting rather than of arriving, and the Holy Spirit is entirely used to working with people who are doing the right thing without the accompanying warmth.

You are still loving him, and the feeling has never once been the part that counted. Romans 8:22 describes creation waiting rather than feeling good about it, and the Spirit of God is the one who honors what a person does on the days they do not feel like it.