Dear Father, please comfort this family during this difficult time. Give them peace and strength, and if it is your will, show mercy to their dog and grace him with your healing hands.  Please Lord, do not let this dear animal suffer. Thank you, Father.  In Jesus's name, Amen.

I read a story about Jesus once -- fiction, of course, but the author did a real nice job of writing about what it might have been like for Him, growing up.  How He, oddly, unusually, took pity on a little stray dog, saved it from being killed by some bad boys who were throwing rocks at it.

Remember, for a Jew in the time and place where our Lord grew up, a dog was a terribly unclean beast, a carrion-eater, a picker of scraps, a scrounger among the burning dung heaps outside of town.  Nasty, filthy, diseased -- maybe in reality, maybe only in the eye of the observer, but, well... There was probably no such thing as a pet dog for those people.

But that author imagined the Lord loving and pitying that little puppy, so convincingly, as well as the perfect love and adoration that little pariah dog displayed toward the Lord.  If I can look her up, and the title of her book, I will post it here.  It might be a comfort to read it.

It is entirely in Jesus' character to appreciate the love and loyalty of a good dog.

God bless Ray Ray.