God Cares About the Small Things

I’m not exactly sure when my husband started contemplating getting me a dog.

I believe the final straw came when life took us to Eglin Air Force Base in the panhandle of Florida, where my husband served as a physician. We chose to live on base, completely unaware that what we were actually choosing was to live in the middle of baby central.

The tough part? We were unable to make a baby ourselves.

(If one more person told me just to drink the base water to get pregnant, I might have shoved their face into that water.)

One day I was crying in my husband’s arms about how I couldn’t work full-time from home in the middle of a neighborhood full of popping bellies while he was gone eighty hours a week. The next moment he was pulling up a video featuring a tiny pile of spots jumping enthusiastically all over the screen.

“What is that?” I asked.

“That’s your dog,” he replied.

A few days later, a plane landed at our local airport. Our little Scrubs was inside. Fifteen pounds of six-week-old Dalmatian puppy.

I was instantly smitten.

My husband purposefully picked a very high-maintenance puppy to keep me occupied. He picked a dog that liked to jog so I’d have a jogging partner. He picked a breed that was a conversation starter so while I was out on walks, I’d meet new people and not feel isolated.

Everything he hoped for came true—and more.

Scrubs chewed up (and ate) absolutely anything that was left on the floor. He swallowed socks whole. (One time he even threw up a pair of socks!) He lovingly attacked visitors with excitement. He busted through the front door any time he saw a sliver of an opportunity and would go stand across the street with the neighbor’s hat in his mouth, refusing to come back and refusing to drop the hat.

“I’m not sure I can do this. This dog is so much work,” I said to my husband one night during dinner. “And if dogs are this tiring, I’m not sure I even want a baby.”

When Scrubs was a year old, a baby finally blessed our doorstep. Eight months later, there was another baby. Two years after that came another. Two years after that, yet another.

Within five years, through the miracles of adoption and pregnancy, we added four children to our once silent household.

Each time, Scrubs was there to greet those little babies with loving licks and amazing gentleness. As energetic as he was, he somehow understood that these little people needed to be calmly welcomed to our pack.

Scrubs moved with us from Florida to Turkey. From Turkey to Portugal. From Portugal to Nashville. And in 2015, he moved with us to our “forever home,” a farm we had been dreaming of since long before we even dreamed of Scrubs, in Eastern Tennessee.

By the time we got to the farm, Scrubs was nearing eight years old and finally not getting into everything in sight. Sure, he still sometimes counter-surfed and stole a hunk of steak. We still had to continually try to outsmart him to attempt to keep him off the furniture.

But mostly he ran around our hundred acres frolicking with the ducks and geese and chickens and pigs and sheep and guineas on our land, as if he had been born for it. He absolutely loved the farm. It was as if he had been waiting his whole life to live there.

And then he got sick.

And then the vet told us he only had a few weeks left to live.

And then he died.

And then we buried him on our farm.

I know he was “just a dog,” but to me, he was so much more, and my husband brought me great comfort when he reminded me that Scrubs had done exactly what God created him to do. He got me through infertility. He greeted our babies. He protected and loved us as we moved around the world, and he got us to our forever farm with love and snuggles and gigantic doses of dog hair!

As we said our last goodbyes and hung Scrubs’ collar on his grave marker, I realized that God had given me Scrubs. I always sort of knew it, but it wasn’t until I said goodbye that I became fully aware that that big pile of spots was created just for me.

God cares about the little things. God cared about my heart. He knew I needed something to get me through those years of infertility. So God made Scrubs. And he gave Scrubs to me. He gave me nine years with that dog, including one final year of total joy spent running around our farm before we had to say goodbye.

God cares.

You may not hear his voice or feel his arms, but his love is there in the lick of a puppy, the strength of a friend’s hand, the phone call that comes out of nowhere encouraging you to go on. God’s fingerprints are everywhere.

And they were all over my boy Scrubs.

Best dog ever.

Good boy.

Wendi Kitsteiner is a former city girl now living on a farm in the middle of nowhere, Tennessee with her husband and four young children. She is passionate about the causes of infertility, adoption, and keeping it real as a mom. You can follow her at flakymn.blogspot.com or becauseofisaac.org.