I saw a stray dog

Context
As I was heading to Texarkana for Friends meeting today, I saw a dog running along the side of the road. After some internal debate, I pulled a u-turn and went to go look for it. I found the dog, but he ran away from me and seemed to be heading for a house a little ways off the road, so I gave up the chase.

Commentary
It was important to me to include the "internal debate" stuff in the Context, because I didn't want to go after this dog. Attending to stray dogs is a hassle. You often can't catch them, and when you do manage to get them in your car, you then have to decide what to do with them. Even if they have a collar with a current tag on, reaching the owners is sometimes a matter of several phone calls, and where does the dog stay in the interim?

No collar, no tag is even worse. Take the dog to the shelter? OK if it's open, but it often isn't, and even if it is, sometimes the people there suspect that you're dropping off your dog, not a stray, and give you a hard time. I used to work at the SPCA; I understand the instinct.

So why did I do something I didn't want to do? I think I know, but first I want to talk about some arguments I don't find compelling. You could say that I really did want to go after the dog, and that may be true, but as an explanation it's completely useless. If I can't even consciously access my own motivations and desires, there is little point in trying to analyze my actions. There's just this shadow self of mine that apparently does whatever it feels like.

Similarly, I find deterministic explanations of behavior problematic. By "deterministic" I mean both the religious idea of predestination and the scientific theory that brain chemistry controls everything. Despite their disparate backgrounds, these two ideas are remarkably similar in effect: they remove personal responsibility and self-actualization from the equation.

Also, it seems like determinism is both overly simple and overly complex. Simple in that it would answer every behavioral question the same way, either "God made me do it," or "My neurons made me do it." The complexity comes in when you look at that internal debate I mentioned earlier. It seems remarkably inefficient for either God or my brain to decide I should do go after a stray dog, then let me spend several seconds mulling the decision over. Why not just send me off right away?

So maybe you're thinking the reason I went after the dog was because even though I didn't want to, I thought it was the right thing to do. This is certainly closer to the truth, in that I do think stray dogs present an ethical problem. My husband will tell you that I grieve and pray over dead animals in the road, but for me, domesticated animals are a special case. At some point in our history as human beings we made agreements with dogs and cats that we would take care of them in return for some service. A stray dog indicates that we've dropped our end of the leash, if you take my meaning.

However, the reality is that I don't always go after every stray dog I see and even today, I didn't move heaven and earth to capture this one. So why did I perform this particular set of somewhat unusual actions today? Because I received a very specific call from God and (eventually) answered it. It's not predestination; it's a conversation with God about what I'm going to do. People look at me funny when I say that the reason I don't drink caffeine is because I had an argument with God about it and lost, but it's the truth!

In this case, the call was to go see if I could help the dog. Once it starting running away, I was released from the call. If you're not religious, you may prefer to think that my conscience smote me on this particular occasion, and that's fine. From my perspective, doing something I don't want to do seems so unlike me that it feels like an external presence. Ergo God.

"C'mon Lynn," you may be saying, "why would an omniscient God ask you to do something so pointless? Stop your trip, turn around, and not even catch the dog? What's up with that?"

I don't know, which is another reason I point the finger at an external God rather than my own internal mechanisms. This whole blog post has illustrated that I like to have good explanations for the things I do. Sometimes, it seems like God just says, "Nah, let's do this instead."

Which doesn't mean I can't impose an explanation after the fact, so here are are two possibilities:

1) Obedience is more important than results.

2) It made me blog about God, right?

What did you see today?