Article March 21, 2016 Issue

Rusty, come home!

Hunter Benkoski

Rusty, our golden retriever, was missing.

It was evening, around the time when we usually bring him inside for the night. But he was nowhere to be found. Everyone in my family was immediately concerned for Rusty’s safety, as he had never been beyond the wooded area that surrounds our house. And now, darkness had fallen, and it was starting to rain pretty heavily. To make matters worse, there had been several recent stories in the news about animals that had disappeared or been treated cruelly outside their homes.

I was extremely afraid, imagining all kinds of worst-case scenarios. But my mom shared a passage from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy that helped me think more clearly and more spiritually about the situation. The passage was, “God is the Life, or intelligence, which forms and preserves the individuality and identity of animals as well as of men” (p. 550). It was reassuring to think of Rusty being preserved by God and to know that he could never be outside God’s safeguarding, life-giving power.

Send a comment to the editors