Dogged by Good Luck

A couple of weeks ago my wife Claire and I were out on one of the many walks we enjoy together, and we passed through an old chapel graveyard. As we looked at the various memorials, one of them really made me smile. The stone was etched with the name of the person laid to rest there, of course, but underneath was the inscription Dogged by Good Luck.

I am aware that I am very fortunate (I would say blessed) by a naturally optimistic nature and that I am usually able to look on the bright side of things and to count my blessings. So this headstone really struck a chord with me. What a wonderful way to look at one’s life – the sense of it seems to me to be that good luck, fortune, blessedness was following this person almost regardless of what they did. Dogged not by ill luck, or mischance, but by good luck. I love that! It reminds me of the final verse of Psalm 23 which speaks to the same notion: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

This week, I definitely felt dogged by good luck. On Tuesday, I was in Oxford, back there for in-person lessons at Regent’s Park College. This itself is a huge blessing – to be studying theology, at Oxford, with a wonderful cohort of students in this beautiful city is truly amazing. I had arranged to meet with a couple of other students to talk and pray together about a particular issue one of them was wrestling with. We met at college and walked round the corner to a little park, where we sat on the grass and talked.

As we talked, an older lady came onto the scene walking a dog. Now I should say at this point that I am kind of hankering for a dog but Claire (probably correctly) isn’t sure the time is right, so I remain dogless and hankering, though I do have a shortlist of dogs on my wish-list. All of the breeds I particularly like are large and quite slobbery, which to be fair, doesn’t help me make my case for their inclusion in the Lace family! However, there is the one small breed on the list – a Border Terrier (a small dog that just thinks it’s a big dog!).

Well, the lady in the park was walking a Border Terrier and as my friends and I talked she and dog seemed rather to be orbiting around the three of us. At length, just as we’d started to pray, the lady came in and said hello and sorry about the dog… So I struck up a conversation with her and the dog was soon all over me! As we chatted, it became apparent that she was living alone and had the dog on loan to keep her company. I asked if we could pray for her and she asked if it would be OK to pray for peace. Not “world peace”, you understand, but inner peace for the many, many people like her around the world, who are struggling because of the pandemic and the isolation and loneliness it has caused.

Well, it occurred to us that our little group was perhaps already an answer to that prayer for her – for here we were having a lovely chat with her! But of course we prayed for her too – as well as the issue we had been there to talk through in the first place. I came away so grateful to God. Grateful that what was originally going to be a one-to-one chat had become a group of three, which made it much easier and gave much better support than I could have done alone. Grateful that the conversation had gone really well (even before our doggy interruption), grateful for the friends I was with and grateful for the chance to pray for the lady who had chanced (?) upon us. And of course, I was very grateful for the unlooked-for cuddles with this delightful Border Terrier!

Thank you, God! Indeed, I am truly dogged by good luck – or rather, I am persistently and abundantly blessed!