"Like many of us, I am impulsive, and often with the best will in the world. I want to make everything all right. Sometimes I am given instructions in dreams. I am told to stop running and rest. Told that many of us are too quick to respond to requests for healing. We are so eager to help that we rush in with our words, our hands, our touch. Wait! Jesus told me in a dream. Wait until you are certain that God has come into your hands before you place them on someone for healing. It must be God's energy flowing through your hands, not your own. Wait. Wait. Until you are sure it is God.
"Yes.
"My dog, Doc, a golden retriever who was an affectionate, bouncy ball of love, used to come with me to the library of the cathedral and sit quietly under my desk, controlling her friskiness, lying at my feel without restlessness until it was time for a run in the yard.
"One day a young woman came into the library to ask me for prayer for the healing of terrible pain in the bones of her jaw. We sat, a foot or two from each other, and I tried to wait until I knew that God had come into my mouth and my hands.
"Doc quietly got out from under my desk, sat in front of Naomi, raised her paw, and put it gently on Naomi's knee and kept it there. This is anything but typical behavior for a golden. Their love is usually ecstatically active: enthusiastic pawing for attention, wagging tail, eagerly licking tongue with little sympathetic kisses of love. But Doc sat there in front of Naomi, her paw steadily on Naomi's knee, without moving, quietly and steadily looking up at Naomi. I think we slipped out of time. I don't know how long Doc sat there before she finally dropped her paw and slid back under my desk.
"There was no question in either Naomi's or my mind who had been chosen as the instrument of healing that afternoon. It filled me with an awed humility. We descendants of Adam and Eve tend to want credit for all such deeds, but God made all things, all creatures great and small, and all can be used for healing — or for destruction, if we are deep into pride and sin. What I felt was an amazed sense of gratitude for God's love, and a humble joy that in witnessing it I had been part of God's healing power.
"Isn't it interesting that someone's over-high blood pressure can literally be lowered by stroking a dog or a cat? The animal is not consciously acting to lower the blood pressure; nevertheless it has been statistically proven that this is what happens. My own relationship with my animals has taught me much about playing, loving, healing. My little white cat does not like to hear voices raised in anger. When my son, Bion, was young, our old collie would not let anyone strange or in any way threatening go near our little boy. Animals have a sensitivity that we have forgotten as we have fractured God's love for all of creation in our greed, our grabbing for control, our prideful centering on the human creature as the only thing of importance in the created order. "