It is interesting to me how we carry over the names of characters in books into our current lives. I had a friend who named his dog “Frodo” after the character in “Lord of the Rings.” In similar fashion, I named one of my dogs “Scout” because of a dog in one of Jim Kjelgaard’s books.

For a while, Jim Kjelgaard was my favorite author. I read everything of his that I could find. I first read “Haunt Fox” when I was in junior high. I was hooked from that point on. Jim wrote young adult adventure stories that focused on animals. I loved them.

Scout was the main character of the book “Snow Dog.” It was a story about a trapper in the forested wilds. Scout was an Alaskan Husky dog. I was enamored with that whole style of life, so the name “Scout” stuck with me. My own “Scout” was not a Husky, but he was a good dog. My wife and I got him from the animal shelter as a halfgrown puppy. He was short legged, long haired, and spotted brown and black on white. He was cute.

However, Scout had one aggravating habit – he was a chewer. We got Scout when my wife and I were newlyweds. We both worked, plus, I was attending Seminary. Scout wasn’t house broken yet, we had no yard, so we locked him in the bathroom while we were both gone. He chewed a large hole in the hollow-core door to the bathroom. Later when we moved to our first church, Scout rode in the backseat as we moved from Indiana to Montana. He chewed a hole in the armrest on the side door of our new Chevy Malibu.

The worst time was after we arrived at our new position. My parents had purchased a new Revised Standard Version Bible that I had requested for my nineteenth birthday. It was a special and precious gift to me. One Sunday morning, I took a different Bible from which I planned to preach. When we returned home, Scout had chewed off half of the cover and several chapters of Gene- sis from my cherished gift Bible. I wanted to kill Scout that day. I didn’t do it because mostly he was a good dog.

In the book of Revelation of the Bible there is a verse that says, “So I went to the angel and told him to give me the little scroll. And he said to me, ‘Take and eat it; it will make your stomach bitter, but in your mouth it will be sweet as honey.’” (Revelation 9:10 ESV). Scout enjoyed chewing up my leather bound Bible. I’m sure it was “sweet as honey” to him. I secretly hoped it was “bitter” on his stomach.

I’ve often thought as I read that passage that sometimes we are angry with people and really want to tell them off. The words we want to say seem “sweet as honey” in our mouths. But often, after they are spoken, they are “bitter” on our stomachs because we realized afterwards how hurtful those words had been.

Maybe chewing up my Bible wouldn’t have been so pleasant to Scout if he’d known how precious that gifted Bible had been to me. But, he was just a dog, doing what came natural to his nature. We aren’t. We’re rational, thinking beings who have the ability to think things through before we act or speak. We would do well to do so!

– Just a Thought Dale Fillmore is lead pastor at New Day Church.