God as Dog

It isn’t original, but the idea of God (Love) residing in a dog (loyalty) is a clever one. Those of us who have dogs as pets know that their greatest lesson for their owners is how protective and loving they are.

The final entry I’m sharing from “Miraculous Journey” is Chapter Six, written by Anne Strieber:

While lying in that hospital bed, I got to thinking once again about God and the amazing way God has been in my life. Without being a particularly religious person, I would call myself a Godly person. Somehow, I am not sure how, I have come to consider God a very personal part of my life. While Whitley struggles mightily with stubbornly-held secular beliefs that his own life experience tells him are completely false, I find myself comfortable with the reality of God, but also aware that this is a very subtle presence, just a little too real to me to be imaginary, but not much.

You don’t bump into God often, and when you do, the moment can be easy to overlook.

It was while I was thinking about things like this that I realized the extent to which both Whitley and I have had our lives saved by dogs–or rather bumping into God as dog.

One night about three years ago while Whitley was meditating, he saw in his mind’s eye a big old dog shambling up to him. He recognized the dog as being the pet of a childhood friend. The dog had been called Quagmire, and despite the fact that he had a really hard life, Quag was always bursting with joy.

At the time, Whitley had just lost a lot of money in a notorious Wall Street fraud, and we were poor for the third time in our lives.

I said to him, “It’s a message for you, the old ‘have joy’ message that you got from the visitors so many years ago. It’s about being joyous in times of adversity.” Then I thought to myself, “dog is an anagram of god.” So I said, “Maybe it was a meeting with god.” He laughed and said, “If I’m going to believe that, ‘I need a sign.’”

A bit later, we walked out to go to the store. As we reached the street, he stopped dead in his tracks. He pointed at a car. “Look there,” he said. The car had a vanity plate. It was QGMIRE. Without being able to be certain about anything, as always, we accepted the idea that a relationship with God as dog was on offer to us.

This has led us down an amazing path of miracles, saving both of our lives once, and mine now twice, and as will be seen, hopefully a third time.

When Whitley decided to rent a stick-shift car on a trip to England in order to drive out to Stonehenge (on the “wrong” side of the road), he had a vivid dream the night before about his childhood dog Candy, who had been his beloved pet. When he used to climb trees, Candy would wait below, then rush up and nip him when he came down. She thought it was dangerous and didn’t like him doing it. In this dream, she was warning him about the rental car. He said, “It was so real, it was like she was lying in bed between us. I hand my hand in her fur. I could feel her and smell her and then I thought, ‘Wait a minute, Candy can’t be here, she’d have to be at least sixty years old.’”

He woke up and she was, of course, gone. He felt that she had been warning him about something, but he didn’t know what it was.

The next evening, we started for Stonehenge. It quickly became obvious that Whitley couldn’t drive safely on the left side of the road. We were going down a dark, narrow country lane when he suddenly said, “This is what Candy warned me about. If we don’t turn around, we’re going to be killed.”

As he began to maneuver off the road, a huge truck came around the corner, its lights bearing down on us. Whitley panicked and almost swerved into it, but because he had been prepared by Candy’s message and was already turning around, he managed to get us out of the way just in time.

Thank you, Dog.

The reason that I had my surgery when I did concerns another miracle, also involving dogs. The first seizure had been explained and we’d put it in the past, not knowing the terrible danger that I was actually in.

But then, on the night of April 27, Whitley was awakened by a horrible screeching sound in the sky. As he came to consciousness, he noticed that all the dogs in the neighborhood were barking, and also that something was wrong with me. I was on my stomach asleep, but the bed was shaking. He turned me over and found that I was in the middle of another seizure. He helped me through it, then called our doctor early Sunday morning, and it was then that the road to the discovery of my tumor began.

On Monday, I got another CAT scan. Wednesday, the doctor called and said to go to the emergency room immediately because I had something in my brain.

I remember hearing the dogs, too. Five minutes after the seizure (it was a short one) I had regained consciousness and my first thought was, “Why are all the dogs barking?” Whitley said that there was something above the roof, and it was making a horrible noise. In fact, the dogs barked and cried for another half hour. You could hear people trying to comfort them.

If that had not happened, my seizure would never have woken Whitley up and the dangerous situation I was in would never have been discovered.

Had it gone even another few weeks, I would have been left with only a short time to live, maybe just months or even less.

If God has the guts to come to us as a humble dog, I can only be grateful. I owe Dog my life.

Thank you, God!

Strieber, Anne; Strieber, Whitley. Miraculous Journey . Crossroad Press. Kindle Edition.