This weekend, our bagle (Beagle/Bassett Hound mix) died unexpectedly. My sweet husband went to bring him in from the yard on Friday evening and Steve (the bagel) collapsed into a seizure. Needless to say, the night went downhill from there. The vet did not (and still does not) know the cause, but we suspect that he ingested some type of toxin that entered his bloodstream and caused the seizures. At 1:00 a.m. on Saturday, December 12 we made the heart wrenching decision to end Steve's suffering. After a tearful goodbye to our most faithful friend, Steven T. Cover fell peacefully to sleep in his bed at the University of Missouri Small Animal ER.
The shock of Steve's death has cause a lot of tears in the Cover household. I hardly know what to say about it, but my dear father in-law provided some much needed words of wisdom on Saturday morning. While we are still grieving, David and I are filled with the hope of heaven and long for the day when creation will be redeemed and restored. I will end with my father in-law's words and and the hope that I will, one day, see Steve's waggly tale and smushy face again.
"Jesus said in Matthew 10:29–30, "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." Steve did not "fall" apart from the will of your Father in Heaven who cares about you more than you can imagine, all the way down to the smallest detail in your life.
In everything God brings into our lives, even times where we're truly "grieved" by sadness due to loss, God sees these times as "necessary" in order to ultimately give us our eternal inheritance. Somehow, some way, in all this, Steve "fell" by the will of your Heavenly Father because he is giving you his eternal kingdom in all this. We can't see how. But God sees it as "necessary."
And who knows? C.S. Lewis, who loved his dogs like we do, wondered whether the dogs of Christians might not be there in heaven for us, since we are eternal and we therefore give eternality to them. Kind of like the way God gives eternality to us because he loves us. Our worth is connected to his love for us. So too, perhaps God allows us to give eternality to our beloved animals as well because we truly love them. "
