In 2022, when my daughter Annabella was 10, we started talking about a second dog, and she got the speech every child gets.
If we get a puppy, he’s yours to feed, brush, play with, and walk twice a day, rain or shine, and in Florida the shine is the harder half. She agreed to all of it, the way a 10-year-old agrees to anything you put between her and a puppy.
We drove to Orlando for an 8-week-old red golden retriever, who lay in her lap the whole ride home. That was Sherlock, to go with Watson.
She kept her end longer than I expected, walking both dogs for a couple of years and running with them on weekends. She’s 14 now, with volleyball, band, and everything else that 14 is.
Last week, it was in the 90s at 6 p.m., and I was the one on the sidewalk with two big dogs. The one sitting under the leash hook had no idea anyone had ever promised him anything. He knew the time.
I have no standing to complain. At the same age in Montréal, I made the same promise to my parents to adopt a shelter dog named Smokey. The trouble there was 30 degrees below rather than 90 above. No coat, no booties. On the worst mornings, neither of us wanted to go, and often I didn’t. My parents did not take the leash from me, and they paid every other bill: the vet and the furniture, which Smokey marked whenever we left him alone.
Psalm 15 is a brief list of who is welcome in God’s house, and it reads as a portrait of the person you can rely on: honest, no slander, no bribes, and, in a line that needs no updating, one “who swears to his own hurt and does not change.” He made a promise, learned what it would cost, and paid. When I told a 10-year-old yes, I knew who would end up on the sidewalk.
You can keep a promise and keep score at the same time. I catch myself at it on the hot side of the street, drafting the sentence about whose job this was, with nobody to send it to. The dog never heard the promise. The girl who made it is at practice. Robert Service wrote that “a promise made is a debt unpaid,” and his narrator hauls a frozen friend across the Yukon to keep one, unwatched and unpaid. The debt in this house was mine before she spoke.
Somebody in your house may have made a promise that you are the one keeping. The deal never included what I got out of it: an hour outdoors I’d otherwise skip, two dogs who think 6 p.m. is the finest idea anyone ever had, and, most evenings, the memory of a 10-year-old asleep in the back seat with a puppy in her lap.
One Sunday remains in the month, and it belongs to the person others can count on. Sherlock is sitting under the hook, waiting for a promise fulfilled.
Scott Tilley is the founder of CTS Ministries and an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. You’ll be able to find this column, Spirituality Today, every Sunday at floridatoday.com. Contact Tilley at stilley@cts.today.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: The hidden cost of promises made to our children | Spirituality Today
Reporting by Scott Tilley, Florida Today / Florida Today
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By Scott Tilley, Florida Today | USA TODAY Network
