The old vs. the new

Colossians 2:20 If then you have died with Christ to material ways of looking at things and have escaped from the world's crude and elemental notions and teachings of externalism, why do you live as if you still belong to the world?

So this is going to be a roundabout (and is tied to having some Darcy pictures that need to be shown), but in one of those weird times where I wake up in the middle of the night, can't go back to sleep, and think too much, I was thinking about how much Darcy enjoyed living life unleashed last. This is an old dog, raised in the 'burbs, by a nervous person who maintains firm control of the leash any time we venture out into public. She's a labrador mix who never saw water until she was 4 years old. But when she found water, she knew exactly what to do with it...jump right in.

Last week, she approached jumping off the dock with caution but interest. And this just makes me think about how dogs, no matter what breed, have a memory of what they were bred for, even though they might have been thouroughly yuppie-fied. Shelties herd, labs swim, beagles trail...that's just what they do. Stopping them from doing those things is the challenge. Preventing them from swimming or running around your feet or barking all the time, they have to learn those things.

So we're sorta the same. We're born with one nature and, if we're lucky, we learn to use some pieces of that and then to change what needs to be different. Really, I just wanted to put up more Darcy pictures.