I have often wondered why people love their dogs so much. Over the past three years of having Achilles in my life I now know the answer. In our lifetime there are few people, if any, who truly love us unconditionally-- who love us in spite of all our faults, all our failures, all our weaknesses, and with no strings attached. As a child who grew up feeling that her natural father had abandoned her, I grew up with a wrong perception of the love of God. The love of God was not constant but fleeting, not given freely but earned; and God may or may not be there when I called. He was not my ‘Heavenly Father,’ but the ‘heavenly version of my earthly father.’

It took the love of a dog to change that perception. A dog loves you unconditionally. You can neglect him, and he loves you, turn your back on him, and he loves you, abuse him with words, or even physically; still, when you turn around he is there wagging his tail. While God doesn’t wag His tail, His response is very similar. We turn our backs on Him, yet He never turns His back on us. We neglect His Word, yet He remains faithful. He is the “same yesterday ...today and forever,” Hebrews 13:8.

As I have watched Achilles suffer, unable to stand at times under his own strength, I can only imagine how our Heavenly Father felt as He watched His beloved Son suffer repeatedly-- to see Him skinned alive with a whip and stumbling under the weight of the cross. God’s unconditional love was on display that day; His grace was personified in His Son. My grief, as real as it is, cannot compare to the grief God had that day, nor can it compare to the grief He has when people reject His only Son. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life,” John 3:16. In this, the greatest display of grace, God paved the way for us to spend eternity with Him through faith alone in Jesus Christ.

When the Veterinarian told me Achilles had acute leukemia, my first reaction was shock. “How could this be?,” I asked. She told me that he was just unlucky. But I knew that wasn’t the case. In my weakness I have asked, “How could a dog be healthy one day, and be given a death sentence the next?” Did God cause this? Absolutely not; but God allowed it to happen, and I knew the reason why I picked that particular puppy out of the litter.

We lost Achilles on April 23rd with his family by his side. I cried for mercy while he was so sick, but the time came when I had to be the one merciful. There is comfort in the fact we did the right thing and did not prolong his life out of selfishness. The last thing Achilles did before he died was to show his unconditional love by licking me. I will cherish the memories of the time we had together, and the love he showed me. I will be eternally grateful that my Heavenly Father has shown me, through the love of a dog, what the love of God truly is. Achilles' life was for a purpose. His death will be to those who in reading this come to know the Love of God. Knowing what I know now, and the pain involved in learning that lesson, I would still have picked that same puppy out of the litter.