I made my way down the winding, gravel driveway that connected the secret world of summer camp with the busy reality of normal life. I was working as a counselor at church camp, and I tried to make the most of my precious two-hour break each day. I usually chose between napping and going on a run. This afternoon, I calculated I would have time for a four-mile run and still be able to shower and rest a bit before dinner. I had already measured earlier in the summer where the two-mile turnaround point was, so I slipped into autopilot.

I approached an intersection, where I was going to be turning right. To my left was a house up on a hill. The only other residence in sight across the fields of corn and the woods was a trailer parked right on the corner of the crossing streets.

I began to hear dogs barking coming from the direction of the hill house. I glanced to my left to see two mutts with shaggy dark hair racing down the hill toward me. They were medium-sized dogs… maybe even on the larger side of medium. I became a little nervous but remembered my runs in high school back home. Whenever dogs would chase me, they always gave up and turned back toward home, playful tails a-wagging.

So I did my best to ignore the dogs by gritting my teeth and closing my eyes, trying to stifle my flight instinct and continued jogging. The dogs ran alongside me for a brief second, then turned around. Small sigh of relief. I tried to let my mind wander… to the girls in my cabin, the evening’s campfire program, my upcoming free weekend… but I couldn’t shake a certain nervousness about my encounter with the loose dogs. I prayed that they would be gone when I came back around. Before I knew it, I had turned around and was approaching the intersection for the second time. I was relieved to see the dogs were nowhere in sight. Yet as I began down the road toward camp, I heard them again.

Maybe my fear was heightened, or maybe I just paid more attention. But I didn’t just hear them bark. I heard their collars tinking with their tags. I heard their paws pound the packed dirt. I heard the snarl of their saliva slap around on their teeth as they shouted at me. I slowed down to a jog, unsure of what to do. They tore at me across the yard, much faster, it seemed, than last time. I kept looking straight ahead, hoping they’d leave me alone once they noticed I was harmless.

Again, they began to travel alongside me. But only for a second. As if in slow motion, I heard the dog on my left… the darker and larger of the two… suck in air as he opened his mouth, aiming at my leg. The air gushed out as his top and bottom teeth dug into both sides of my thigh.

In the tiny span of time that passed between being bitten and reacting, an entire scenario played itself out in my head. It wasn’t my life flashing before my eyes; it was fear catapulting me into the very near future. I saw the dogs tear my 125-lbs. of human flesh to the pavement with a sickening thud. I saw myself trying to flail and shake myself free, and no one was around to hear my cries.

I yelped in a throaty voice and once I regained my composure and my lungs, screamed. Startled, the dogs backed off a little. In a split second, my fear turned to seething anger.

I waved my arms at them and stared them square in the face. “NO!” I snapped as mean and loud as I could possibly muster. “GET AWAY! NO!” They backed up, seeming dazed. I began walking quickly away, calculating in my mind what my next move was. I was a mile away from camp. Walk back? Approach the trailer and ask for help? No one else would be down this road. I knew it. I stopped and stared at the trailer for a bit. It looked abandoned, incredibly dirty, and in all honesty, creepy. Sporting an extra sensitive intuition as well as nerves that were heightened like leaves in a tornado, I chose to walk back.

As I calmed down, constantly checking to see if the dogs were following me, I stopped to examine my leg. My shorts were ripped clear up to the elastic waist band on the left side, I had a deep inch-long cut on the left side of my thigh. Blood had begun to drip clear down to my sock and shoe, staining them red. There were deep scratches clear on the opposite side of my leg. I frowned and realized he managed to nearly fit my entire leg in his mouth.

That was when I started to cry. My anger melted away, and the fear surfaced again. My breathing became a little more labored and hot tears washed salty sweat onto my lips. I sped up my walking, clinging to my shorts to keep them together, as I imagined diseases and rabies traveling to my heart and quickly taking over my body.

The next few minutes passed slowly as I walked. I kept imagining things, like my body all of a sudden showing symptoms of some mad dog disease that I knew must exist. I kept licking my lips… was I foaming at the mouth? I kept feeling my cut throb… was it getting infected?

I finally got back to the camp owner’s house at the foot of the camp driveway. Laverne, the mother and keeper of all that is camp, immediately grabbed me and threw me into the bathroom, pulling soap and alcohol out of nowhere. She demanded that I wash the wound as many times as I could while she called the sheriff and found me an extra pair of her daughter’s shorts.

The sheriff arrived just about the time Laverne’s husband, Dave, drove down from camp in his truck. After filing a report, describing the dogs, and enduring photos of my injuries, I readied myself to go back to camp. Before I did, Dave sat me down.

“I’ve told you counselors before running out there on those roads is dangerous,” Dave said. I looked down sheepishly. I knew he was right. “But now you know what to do when you’re being chased. You stop and you look those mean old dogs right in face.” Dave made a scowl, his bushy eyebrows lowering over his eyes and his wrinkled lips puckering out. He pointed at an imaginary dog in front of him with his big, tan farmer hands. “And you show ‘em you’re not afraid. That usually does the trick. Running will just make ‘em chase ya more.”

That day essentially turned into a metaphorical chalkboard for the three things I learned about how life works:

1.) When something threatens me — my safety, my happiness, my well-being, my peace of mind — sometimes I run. And running makes it worse. Ignoring conflict can lead to anger, which is only a form of hurt and heartache. And these can nuzzle their way into my heart until I don’t know how to root them out anymore. Addressing conflict makes me a stronger and more confident person.

2) While it might have hurt at the time, anything that ever caused me pain didn’t disappear from memory very fast… if ever. I remember every wretched detail of times in my life that have led to heartache. In fact, I still bare some of the scars to prove it. These times made such an impression on me that I’ve since learned to tread lightly the next time around. This has served me well.

3) I better understand God’s discipline and guiding through trials. Why can’t everything be warm and fuzzy when we allow God to lead us? Because we wouldn’t grow… we wouldn’t learn, and we wouldn’t budge.

Sometimes instead of running from the hurt and pain and fear of life, we need to stand our ground and look it in the face. Only then do we learn what life has been trying to teach us all along.

One Response to “Fear, my teacher”

1. Laura Says:
   July 23rd, 2008 at 6:43 am

   The “was I foaming at the mouth” thought cracked me up. So you.

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