It didn’t rain that day. In Oregon that meant something. We held the puppy on the lawn, looking up at a hospital window four stories high, waiting for her to look down on us. It felt like God looking down. When someone is about to die, someone who shouldn’t finish life at forty-two years old, someone fiercely loved, the fierceness of God is there. A God who would take her, though we pleaded and prayed and brought this puppy for her, hoping it would save her life. Could a puppy cure cancer? Unfortunately not.

My mom’s best friend, Pat, named the puppy, Faith. The lab lived on after Pat died following a battle with ovarian cancer when I was fifteen years old. Pat’s daughter was thirteen at the time, blonde-haired, so pretty and sweet. Pat’s sister kept calling the daughter “Faith,” the dog’s name. They were both blonde, but the resemblance ended there. In all that grief love had been displaced.

That pup became precious to us all. I couldn’t look at Faith without thinking of Pat who’d been like my second mom. Pat who took my brother and me with her own children to Disneyland. Pat who let me eat french fries for three days straight. A number of years later, Pat called and congratulated me when a senior boy, voted most popular by his classmates, asked me, a smitten, little freshman, to his senior prom. The song Leather and Lace was the prom’s theme, and the last dance of the night with Stevie Nicks rasping in my ear, I floated in that boy’s arms thinking I was in heaven.

Because of Pat, I can’t untangle that year of love and loss. Of Faith and death. The song Leather and Lace takes me back. Pat looking down from that hospital window before dying, blessing me with a perspective which would endure for the rest of my life.

When I became saved, I understood down to my bones why God loved me. It wasn’t about me. It was about someone more special that God loved.

I hear people say all the time “God loves you.” And this is true. But why does God love you? Why does the Maker of heaven and earth find you and me, such sinful dogs, so lovable?

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given…” Isaiah 9:6. Hundreds of years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah spoke this promise. God knew all along His Son would be born into the world to die for your sins and mine. Jesus would carry the cross to Calvary and shed his blood there so you and I could reconciled with a Holy God.

“Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world! This is the one I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.'” John 1:29. 

Before you and me, there was Jesus. When we come before God, we must remember we come by way of his Son. Christ himself said, “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved” John 10:9.

There is no other way to be saved. Nothing you or I can do can reconcile us to God. Jesus’ death finished it. Fully. Completely. Eternally for all those who confess with their mouth “Jesus is Lord” and believe in their heart God raised him from the dead will be saved, Romans 10:9.

Just like the that pup, Faith, was loved and cherished because of the death of her master Pat, you are loved and cherished because of the death of your Master Jesus. God loves you because Jesus died for you.