Hunting Dog returns

The guest speaker at church today was named Dave Smith, a fly fisherman.  He told the story about him and a buddy driving the 4wheel drive pickup on a dirt track out to put in their drift boat.  The buddy's dog was in the back. Suddenly a pheasant shot up in the air and dog was out of the truck and gone in an instant.  Dave looked at his buddy. The guy said "don't worry about it he'll be gone the rest of the day chasing one pheasant after the other going crazy and racing around for miles."  Then the guy got out of the truck, took his jacket off and dropped in on the ground, got back in and kept driving the 3 or 4 miles to the river.  The fished all day on a 12 mile drift and were driving the drop off vehicle after dark that night back to retrieve the other truck.  They rounded a bend and saw some bright eyes peering at them.  It was the dog. Sitting upright, still as a statue on top of his owner's jacket, waiting to get picked up.  The owner said, "oh yes, he would stay there for two or 3 days if he had to.  He knows that's how he gets home."  Dave was using this to illustrate a part of Genesis 12 when God called Abraham to leave countr, land, and home to go somewhere that God said he'd show him to later.  When they got to Canaan, "God said this is the place." except that there were lots of Canaanites there and it wasn't time yet for the promise to take place.  So Abraham journeyed on, made another altar on another part of Canaan, then journeyed on again to Egypt (because there was a famine in Canaan).  Unfortunately, he forgot to trust God to take care of him and his wife and messed things up down there.  He then returned to his altar, "a place of leaning in to God" is what Dave called it.  He returned, like the dog, to a place where he knew he could get home, knew he would be taken care of, where he had last heard God's voice.  When he got there, he leaned in to God again.