Love. Kindness. LovingKindness. Embodied Compassion. Helping Hand within Endurance. Day-to-Day. Will. Victory. Leadership. Perseverence. Long-haul.
Friends, our family is about to grow! Next week we will be welcoming the four-legged, floppy-eared sweetie you see in the video below into our home. I can tell you, this is going to take lots of Netzach! It is also going to take lots of Chesed, which is going to have to inform our new Day-to-Day.
This sweet girl (name TBD) has been living in foster care for two weeks after two months in a clinic, where she arrived with a broken leg. She clearly has a history of Love in her life. She is friendly, charming, knows how to “sit”, and has basically very good manners. For all of that, we are grateful. We are newbies at this. She does have much to learn yet, however, and this will require time, Perseverence, and heaps of LovingKindness. We are ready and willing to put in the effort, and give her the Loving Leadership she needs to feel safe and at ease in our family.
I also have a very strong feeling that our new companion will add a steady infusion of Love into our Day-do-Day. I wish you all could meet her - she’s one of the most cheerful creatures of any species I’ve ever met.
Although this is happening very quickly, now that it’s happening, the process of us all getting to “yes” has been an exercise in Long-Haul thinking and deferral of Will that has had to be shaped by Compassion. For one family member, this is a massive stretch and a decision to shed a long-standing fear of dogs. For another it is a commitment to take on primary responsibility for her care amidst an already-full life. For yet another, it means learning a new level of flexibility in ways that I’m sure will be a stretch. I feel proud of our family for the LovingKindness that everyone has practiced in order to arrive at the shared Victory of a decision we all feel very happy about.