From our August 14th issue

You haven’t heard from the manse dog in a while, so let me fill you in on how he’s doing.

He has become an ace golf ball sniffer. Every morning we walk down the Struie golf course and off Finn dashes into the long grass, reappearing with a wagging tail and a ball in his mouth.

On a slow morning we can find as few as two, but it has been known for one of the doggy bags I carry for other purposes to be full by the end of our walk.

Which is great when your golf is as poor as mine. An endless supply of golf balls. Some are only any good for using at the driving range. Others are given away to juniors. But Finn the dog is proving to have his uses.

There are, however, several down sides to his "gift". One is that you can’t play golf with him around because any ball you hit is immediately brought back to you. He doesn’t get the concept of playing from where the ball has landed.

And because each ball is retrieved, when he gets tired he runs off with the ball into the longest grass possible and drops it, as if to say "Ha! Now I can have a rest!"

There was also the time he swam across to the wee island in the pond up the side of the sixth hole and picked up a lost ball, jumped back into the water and then gulped. You could see the brain computing "oops" as he swallowed his prize.

It did, I hasten to say, make a reappearance but I won’t go into the detail here.

It is wonderful to have a gift and it is even more wonderful still if that gift is used. There does, however, need to be a modicum of wisdom exercised when it comes to displaying the gifts we have.

It is not always appropriate, for example, to come out with a joke. When people are sad or upset, it can be the last thing they want to hear.

Not everyone wants to be shown your yodelling ability in the middle of the night either.

And sometimes being able to remember every hole of golf you have ever played, or every goal your favourite team has ever scored, is a conversation stopper, not a starter.

Just as Finn has to learn when it’s good to pick up a ball and when it’s better to leave it, so each one of us needs to learn the best times to share our gifts and the best times to keep them to ourselves.

"There is a time for everything" it says in the Bible, "and a season for every activity under the sun."

If Finn could learn that, I would be one happy dog owner. But I suspect he’s not the only one who needs to learn to act time appropriately. His owner does too

– Susan Brown.

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