What Dog Lovers Know About God
I pray that my “dog” lessons will speak to you. If you are dealing with the loss of a loved one (canine, human, or other) or know someone who is grieving, there are several chapters in this book that can help. I began writing this book when my sweet cocker spaniel, Lyssie, died on December 28, 2009. She had been my best friend and companion for nearly twenty years, so when she passed away, a significant chunk of my heart and mind went with her. If the loss wasn’t painful enough, I had a desperate need to know that even though she was dead, that she had not ceased to exist. I had to know that she was with Jesus. It is one thing to be separated from someone in the land of the living, but it’s an altogether different kind of angst in not knowing what has happened to our loved one after death.
Even though I thought this book would be about mourning and comprehending more about the afterlife, I discovered that Lyssie’s end was just the beginning of a new journey, and that in itself is a hope that we can embrace when we grieve or suffer any kind of loss, albeit a loved one, job, house, money, love, friendship, or trust.
You’re probably familiar with Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. At the next-to-last chapter when you expect to be at the end of the novel, you discover that endings are just beginnings of something else, and that a beginning is possible only because it follows an ending. The last words Christ spoke as He hung on the cross were “It is finished,” but oh, what a beginning that followed! His death made it possible for us to have life and a personal relationship with God because His sacrifice of blood cancelled our sin and we can approach God with a clean heart.
“Under the umbrella,” Friedrich says to Jo, “I haf nothing to gif back but a full heart and these empty hands,” and then Jo puts both of her hands into his and whispers, “Not empty now.”[i] God cannot give us certain blessings if our hands are full already, especially if they are full of things of the world or, in my case, Lyssie. Once my hands were empty, He gave me not only one cocker spaniel but two! It is like the end of Job’s story: “And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job when he prayed for his friends, and the Lord increased all that Job had twofold” (Job 42:10).
Both Annie and Gracie were victims of puppy mills and then discarded at high-kill shelters. Annie, who was only one-and-a-half, was scheduled for euthanasia. Both dogs were rescued by women from two different organizations that, thank God, do that— they save dogs, bring them back to life, and then put them up for adoption by posting their sweet, pathetic little faces on the Web. That’s where I found them, at petfinder.com, and was instantly smitten. Since then, they have been my babies. They were born again, as Jesus described in John 3:3. They were given a new parent, a new home, a new life, and hope. This happens to us when we surrender to God.
And then begins the rehabilitation. Just like Annie and Gracie, we often come to God only after life has beaten us up and we’re in bad shape and deprived of love. We have to be healed, learn how to trust, and be transformed into what God intended us to be—just as did my newly adopted four-legged creatures who had to be changed into dogs. My journey with Lyssie and all of the lessons that God taught me because of her were over; a new journey with Annie and Gracie with an entire book full of new lessons had begun.
[i]. Louisa Mae Alcott, Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and
Amy, 1868 (Boston: Roberts, 1880) 573–74, Google Books, Web, 5 Dec. 2015.
