Several years after the loss of their beloved cocker spaniel Abbey, Bishop Hughes and her husband welcome a cocker spaniel puppy, Muffin. At just 11 weeks old, Muffin can teach us a thing or two about curiosity, possibility, and the joyful work of becoming who God created us to be. (Time: 3:24.)
Video Transcript
Welcome to Puppy Central at our house. This is Muffin! Muffin! Muffin! Good girl! You want to say hello to the peoples? Say hello to everybody in the Diocese of Newark? Say you’re happy to be here – you think – but you’ll really be happy when you can get all those people in your house to do what you want them to do at all times.
This is how it works with a puppy. You think you’re in charge, and they’re really running the show. This actually used to be our living room just under a week ago. Muffin came last Thursday – it’s Wednesday, so it hasn’t even been a full week – and it’s been transformed into Muffin Central. Her toys are everywhere. She pretty much is running all over this room much of her time that is awake, which actually isn’t that much. Puppies sleep a lot, and she sleeps about 18 hours a day. I gotta tell you though, those six hours that she’s awake – and thanks be to God, it’s not six straight hours, but it’s interspersed through the day – but those hours where she’s awake are full. Part of it is her learning her way around the house and how we do things, and part of it is just running because of all of the energy and curiosity and things she’s looking to try.
Everything she does is brand new. It’s an interesting thing to watch a little creature learn their way around the world. Every time she walks in that yard, she finds something different that’s in the yard. There is no straight path to anything, and at this point, and she’s just 11 weeks old, we’re giving her space to just discover. We’re not trying to make her learn a whole lot of things. We’re giving her a chance to be in this place and figure out how things, what things are, and how they work.
I have nothing really profound to tell you about this little puppy, other than to say we really missed having a dog in our house, and I used to say over the last year we had a serious case of dog fever. And a puppy is not quite a dog yet. A puppy is on the way to being a full, fully grown adult dog, but that’s about a year and a half from now, and there’s something that the work of a puppy is also the joy of a puppy. Sometimes things that bring us much gladness and help us see, I don’t know, possibility and hope, and a fresh way of looking at the world, mean that you have to do some work with them. And so we’re happy to do the work with this little bundle and see how her personality develops and who she turns into being. But for now, this is Muffin. Muffin, good girl. Good girl!
