A friend of ours, who had lived in the area for a number of years, had some dogs around his camp, and Gypsy was one of them. I call it a camp, because it wasn't much more than that. Where we lived there were no public services to speak of. No electricity, no city water, gas, or Internet. Even drilling your own well was an expensive operation, since the water table was over 500 feet down. Most people paid rent on a water tap in town -- 20 miles away -- and transported water to their homes in big 250-gallon tanks.
The land was dusty and bare, and there were some larger predators about -- coyotes, native red wolves, and even some fearsome timber wolves raised by a breeder and released into the desert when the breeder decided to move away. They were not afraid of people.
Because of the isolation, and the likelihood of predation by both 4-legged and 2-legged interlopers, most people kept a pack of dogs.
When we moved out there and set up camp a few miles from our friend, we had just one dog, a yellow lab. Our friend did the neighborly thing and handed off a few of his dogs to us. One them was Gypsy.
"She's a useless dog," our friend said with a shrug. "She won't come when you call her, and she takes all the other dogs off and loses them in the desert."
I asked what he meant by that, and he explained that she was a wandering dog, and the other dogs would follow her. She always came back, but sometimes the other dogs didn't.
Gypsy was well named.
She was a scruffy little dog that looked to have a lot of terrier in her. When she came to live with us, we found out how well named she was. She would leave right after breakfast, with the other dogs (all except our lab) trailing after her. They would come back in the afternoon, their tongues hanging out and their fur wet. Where they got wet in the middle of the desert I couldn't figure out! One time my son spotted the pack about 15 miles away from camp. He loaded them up and brought them home.
I fed Gypsy, and time-to-time I petted her. Mostly I talked to her as if she were mine. I conversed with her like I did my lab, Ivy. Always a little aloof, she still drew my attention. I thought she was not so useless after all.
And as it turned out, Gypsy taught me something important.
I remember standing out in the dusty little track in front of our camp that passed for a road. Gypsy was about 30 feet away, looking at me. I looked at her.
"Gypsy," I called, "come!" And she came.
I reached down and ruffled her fur a little bit, and then she was off, gone again on some runabout in the desert.
I asked myself, Why does she come to me, when she won't come to anyone else?
The answer came easily: I see her, and I call her by name.
To her original owner, and to most other people, she was useless. Worse than useless, she was the one that got the other dogs lost in the desert. They had no time for such a dog. In their eyes, she was lucky she got a name instead of a bullet between the eyes. But I looked into those eyes and saw intelligence and gentleness. I saw Gypsy.
What I learned from Gypsy was how God deals with us. So often, people may see another human being as useless. Many readers of this sentence have felt discarded like that and seen as useless by other people. But God never sees us that way. He sees our heart. He knows who and what we really are.
Only He can make us into what we were created to be. And we respond to Him because He sees us, and He calls us by name.