January 18, 2025
For eleven years, she was ours — the family dog.
But for about the last eight of those years, her heart belonged to me.
Shiva.
Our beautiful yellow Labrador retriever.
As our kids grew older and busier with their own lives, she and I began spending more and more time together. Long walks. Long talks. Me doing all the talking, of course. She just listened and smiled.
Whether or not she was actually listening was beside the point — I felt heard. And the laugh in her expression? Well, she may have been thinking, When’s dinner? but what I heard was, Everything’s going to be okay.
By the time the COVID lockdown hit in 2020, Shiva and I had settled into a nightly rhythm. Walk. Pray. Pray some more. These walks grounded me in love during a time that generated so much fear and division. She ran loose beside me — never out of sight — steady, patient, faithful.
Looking back, those walks became a kind of living metaphor for faith itself: walking with a presence I trusted, even when I couldn’t clearly see the path ahead.
So when the day came — suddenly and without much warning — for me to say goodbye to her, I wasn’t ready. And yet, by then, I had grown enough spiritually to sense that this was God’s timing, whether I could fully understand it or not.
She had gone as far as she could with me. Now it was time for me to begin walking more intentionally with others — into relationship and community — where faith matures when our love is challenged.
Holding her in my arms as she passed, I thanked her for being such a sweet girl… and for quietly guiding me closer to God through the simple gift of her presence.
January 3, 2026
We hosted a New Year’s potluck, and I was so glad that my friend’s dad, George was able to join us. Over dinner, our conversation drifted — as it often can — to dogs.
George had lost his collie, Semper.
I had lost Shiva.
Both in 2025.
We talked about how much we missed them… and how, sometimes, people seem to love their dogs more easily — even more fiercely — than other humans.
My friend observed, “Well, you know — DOG is GOD spelled backwards!”
We all laughed.
That comment stayed with me.
January 18, 2026
A few weeks later, on the anniversary of losing Shiva, I was standing in the grocery store checkout line when a magazine caught my eye.
“Why Dogs Love Us (And How to Love Them Back).”
I smiled.
Why did Shiva love me?
Three answers came instantly to mind:
Food.
Walks.
And rubbing her itchy ears.
Or were those simply the ways I loved her back? If so, did I really need instructions? My love for her was just as simple and pure as her love must have been for me.
But suddenly, my friend’s New Year’s comment echoed again:
DOG is GOD spelled backwards.
And just like that, the headline flipped itself in my mind and became:
Why GOD Loves Us — and How to Love Him Back.
Now this would be an article for the time we are living in.
The Dog’s Honest Truth About Love
A dog’s love doesn’t ask why.
It doesn’t analyze.
It doesn’t hesitate.
Dogs forgive quickly. They don’t keep score. They rejoice when we return. Their love is wired into who they are — instinctive, present, generous.
And that’s why dogs stir something deep in us: empathy. A softness. A remembering of how love is supposed to feel.
In a world that feels increasingly fragmented and guarded, that kind of love feels like oxygen.
In their own small way, dogs reflect something true about God — not perfectly, but honestly. God doesn’t love us because we’ve earned it. He loves because love is who He is.
Loving God Back
God’s love doesn’t stop at comfort. It moves outward. It matures in relationship. It grows where it costs something.
Love is patient and kind;
love is not jealous or boastful;
it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong,
but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
(1 Corinthians 13:4–7)
This is the love God calls us into — patient, kind, enduring. A love that doesn’t retreat when it’s inconvenient.
And this is where loving God back becomes visible in the world: Not in words or feelings alone, but in how well we love others.
A dog’s love awakens empathy in us. It reminds us how natural it is to receive love without suspicion — and how instinctive it feels to return it. With dogs, the “why” barely matters. Of course we love them back. How could we not?
Plug in God, though, and the question suddenly feels harder — not because He isn’t lovable, but because we live in a culture that constantly tempts us to replace a God who is love with a god of self-love and self-serving comforts. We’re pulled inward. Distracted. Isolated. Walking alone instead of with Him.
And returning His embrace becomes impossible when our backs are turned.
God calls us to take that instinctive love we so easily give — and stretch it. First toward Him. Then outward, toward our neighbor. This is where love grows. This is where faith becomes lived.
That grocery-store headline lingered with me because, once flipped, it points to the deeper question we struggle with today:
Why God loves us — and how we love Him back.
A dog’s love can comfort us.
But love that stretches us — toward God and toward one another — is how we love Him back… and how we are truly changed.
