Do Dogs Really Go To Heaven? A Story of God’s Love For His Creation

Do Dogs Really Go to Heaven?  A Story of God’s Love for His Creation

By Reeni Mederos

In memory of Bear Mederos (January 5^th, 1994 to February 5^th, 2010)

I think some time in many of our lives, if you are a pet lover, you will ask the question, “What happens to our pets after they die?”  This question came up for me on several occasions in my life with pets that I have had that I cared about and passed on.  But when I started a family of my own, it was just normal to have pets because we had kids.  When my children were little, we naturally wanted a dog.  We had an interest in Chow’s and had one a few years before but had to give her away when my first child was born because of apartment regulations.

We moved South to Atlanta from Minnesota and after my second child was born, we got a knock on the front door.  It was a neighbor who had two Chow’s and was giving one away.  One was a black Chow and one was a red Chow.  They gave us the red Chow which was a pure breed and looked almost exactly like the one we have away previously except this one was a male.  He did have an eye lid that was flipped so we agreed to take him and take him to the vet to fix his eye lid.  After his eye lid surgery, we got him neutered.  We love Chow’s because they are so furry and they look like little bears.  So we naturally named our new Chow, “Bear.”  Bear was a puffball at 8 weeks old and was the cutest little puppy.  We were said when we had to give our first one away so we were thrilled when someone gave Bear to us out of the blue.  He was a great addition to the family.

We went to parks, taught him tricks and had a large back yard for him to roam around in.  Sometimes Bear would be an inside dog and sometimes he would be an outside dog.  We especially loved how he grunted and snorted like a bear and a pig mixed together.  Especially when we pet his ears, he snorted like crazy.  He was great with our kids and had always been with us.  We just couldn’t imagine life without him.  We was part of our family.

As time went on and the kids grew older, Bear got older too.  He was a pretty healthy dog and we didn’t have many physical problems with him except for the normal occasion fleas for being an outside dog at times.  We would take him to the vet more than occasionally for shots and check ups here and there.  But for the most part, he was just a healthy dog.  We tried not to feed him too much table food when he got older. Our vet said he was at a good weight and keeping thinner would extend his life instead of letting him get fat on table food.  So on average, Bear would weight 45-50 pounds.  He was a medium sized Chow.  Hi fur was a beautiful red/brown with a classic black tongue that is a Chow’s unique marking for their breed.

So about the last few years, we noticed he was experiencing darker skin coloration, hair loss and hip dysplasia.  The average life span for a Chow is about 12 years.  He began to have some thyroid problems which caused some of the discoloration in his skin and hair loss.  But other than that, he was still very active and didn’t seem to affect him much at first.  Then later he developed problems with his hips in the last two years, which was a common issue for Chow’s.  Over all his health was pretty great and he was just aging.  We felt very blessed to have a pretty healthy Chow as some of his minor ailments didn’t affect his quality of life very much.  We prayed for him quite a bit and my oldest son especially would pray that he has long life.

I can only imagine God answered the prayers of my kids when they prayed for Bear.  As time went on, God proved that this was a miracle dog and I learned so much from his life with our kids and with being a part of our family.  Bear just brought us a lot of joy.  Other than the occasional accidents on the floor, he was potty trained very well but would slip when we forgot to take him out enough on a certain day.  Bear was very gentle and anytime he ate from your hands, he was so good about not biting your finger as intimidating as he looked.  They are naturally aggressive dogs but we were able to tame him and he was just very friendly because he was around kids all the time.  Bear didn’t know what it was like to be alone except when we went on vacation.  He was part of our lives most of my children’s lives.  They all grew up together with him.  I had my third child when Bear was two years old, so even then he was still a young dog growing with all three of my kids.

Over the past year we knew Bear was getting older and he started to have a few old age occurrences.  Last Spring he punctured his left eye and we tried to save it but we ended up having to take it out through surgery.  That cost us about $500 and we were willing to pay for it rather than too put him to sleep.  We weren’t ready for that and felt he could live a good life with one eye.  After his surgery, he did pretty well and we enjoyed him a little longer knowing one of the reasons he lost his eye was because his sight was not as good at 15 than when he was younger.  But we loved him and my kids were not ready to let him go just yet.  How God honors the desires of children and how he loves our families, even our dogs…because we love them.  I felt this was true, but over the next year, God proved to us how much He really does care about the little things in our lives as a family.  God loved Bear too as you will soon read.

One month after Bear lost his eye, we noticed a growth in his mouth underneath his tongue.  We felt that Bear was our miracle dog because he lived so much longer than his life span and God just kept honoring the prayers of my kids to give him long life.  When we took Bear to the vet check out his tumor, the doctor said there was good new and bad news.  The bad news was that it was cancer and was malignant but it wasn’t Melanoma cancer.  This meant that the type of cancer he had was a type of bone cancer and was a slow growing kind.  It was not as aggressive as Melanoma.  At that time, we felt God was giving us time to enjoy Bear and was preparing us to eventually say good-bye.  I was more concerned for my kids being able to handle that type of grief loosing a pet that was apart of the family all their lives.  That would be like losing a beloved family member.  So we did the necessary surgery to get the tumor taken out of Bears mouth and only cost us $100 to do so.  Again, we felt it was better to do the surgery than to put him asleep.  We felt his time wasn’t just yet and I really wanted my kids to have more time to get used to the idea that someday, we will have to say good-bye to our good friend.

Bear was such a miracle dog to me from the beginning.  I was amazed at how healthy he really was for his breed and his age.   The doctor said these are just things that come with old age and it could have been worse.  At age 15 he did really well with his eye surgery and then a month later did really well with surgery to take the tumor out of his mouth.  He continued to live with us for a little while longer.  We were so grateful to catch his tumor in time where it was still small enough to take care of.  The doctor said he still had cancer in his bones but that it might not be something he would die from at his age because it was the slow growing type.  We were hoping to have him for another year.  God in His mercy heard our prayers.

Then, right before thanksgiving of 2009, we had a terrible thing happen.  My husband took Bear out in the middle of the night to let him do his business and he forgot to bring him back inside the house.  We usually didn’t chain Bear up cause we would let him out for a few minutes and call him back inside and was usually very quick.  But on this day, my husband fell asleep on the couch and the next day passed.  It wasn’t until 13 hours later that we realized Bear was missing.  He wasn’t in my bedroom sleeping on the floor so I assumed he was in my son’s room and my son thought the same that he was in our room.  So we finally realized what had happened.  My husband was so tired from a hard days work that he barely remembered the night before and how he forgot to bring Bear into the house.

For the next few hours we went searching in the cold rain for Bear, walking and driving the neighborhood and surround neighborhoods to see if we could find him.  We asked neighbors if they saw him but to no avail.  We thought he wouldn’t be able to get to far since he was already old, his hearing wasn’t that good and because his sight wasn’t that great in his good eye.  Our main concern was that it was cold and he had no food.  The first night passed by and I was so upset.  My family was upset.  After all these years, we had never lost Bear and now that he was older and more feeble, was not the best time to lose him.  I thought for sure he would be gnawed by another dog in a fight or worst yet, get hit by a car if he left the subdivision.

The second night had passed and I was really upset.  I tried to accept that maybe Bear wasn’t coming back and it would be a miracle if he did.  It was day two, it was cold and rainy and the more time passed by, the less change we had to see him again.  I prayed and cried out to God to find him. He always had in the past if we lost him for 20 minutes in the neighbor hood but we had never lost him overnight.  In my distress and my children’s distress, we called upon intercessors from our ministry to pray for him.  I had always prayed prayers over my family for protection and God has always protected us from many things and to me that included my entire household and extended family and Bear was my family to me.  I would always pray healing over him and teach the kids to practice healing on him declaring the blood of Jesus over our family was a regular thing.  Its just a way of life for us appropriating the blood of Christ for lots of situations and protection was one of them, especially for sending my kids off to school every day and as my husband would drive to work everyday.  Its just something you don’t’ live without.

The third day was upon us and I kept holding on hoping against hope.  Some of my students in my online class prayed and believed and even prophesied we would find him.  I prayed for God to return him to us.  The night before I went into a deep intercession and told the enemy to take his hands off my dog and I cried out to God and said, “NOT THIS WAY GOD!  NOT THIS WAY!!!”  I knew we might have to put him too sleep when it was time because of his old age but to find him dead on the street and the fact that he was out there alone, hungry, tired and in the dark was just not acceptable for me.  It just didn’t feel right.  Some of my students offered comfort to us as a family in their prayers as they agreed with us for God to bring him back home safely.  I held on to those prayers.  One such prayer through a student said to hold on and not lose hope that God was going to kiss me the next morning and to get some rest.

Throughout the entire 3 days that Bear was missing, my heart was grieved and yet at the same time I was trying to prepare myself to accept the fact that he was gone.  I had been calling the dog pound and doing research on the Internet as to how to alert the neighborhood of a missing dog.  I gave thorough descriptions of Bear to the dog pound to make sure they would call me if anyone turned him in.  I also thought for sure someone would call since he had his collar on with his rabies tag.  If they called that number, the vet would call us that he was found.

So the third morning, I got up and had gotten some rest from an intense night of intercession over my dog.  I felt Bear was longing for us.  I could feel that in the spirit.  It felt like losing a child in the night to me.  I could feel Bears heart cry to find us.  I don’t’ know how to explain it but I just did.  It is what caused me to to go into a deep intercession over him to bind and break anything that would cause him harm and to bring his death before his time.  As far as I was concerned, I felt like choosing his day of death was a family matter and not something for the devil to decide by taking him away from us even if it was an innocent accident of forgetting to bring him back into the house that night.  I have seen God cover our mistakes before and recompense some bad decisions we made just because we were human and things just happen.  I knew God was a God of recompense.  I just had this terrible gnawing in my stomach that I just didn’t want the devil to kill my dog through another dog in a dog fight or by a car hitting him.  I didn’t feel that was my portion as a child of God.  I definitely put in some demand to God that night during intercession.  I felt he was wanting me to and to take authority.  So I did.

After having my cup of coffee, I decided to call the dog pound one more time that morning.  My kids were home from school during their Thanksgiving break.  They were just as heartbroken as I was and they were missing to hold Bear just as much as I was.  When I called the pound, they said nothing had shown up.  I said, “Thank you.”  As I was talking to my kids that morning, we asked ourselves, “How could Bear survive at his age for 3 days and 3 nights out there on his own?”  We said if God brings him back to us, we would call him Bear-Lazarus for bringing him home.  It would be nothing than miraculous at this point.  We knew if he came home, it just wasn’t his time yet and certainly not for the devil to take his life.  We had thought about putting him to sleep but only when it was the right time to do it.  We wanted him to have a peaceful departing without suffering and a tragic death is not what we were willing to accept so easily.

Then the miraculous occurs.  In the midst of our conversation, the telephone suddenly rings.  I recognize the phone number is from the dog pound.  I said, “Hello?”  The lady on the other end was a worker at the dog pound.  She said, “I think we found your dog.”  I was like, “Really? Are you serious?”  She verified his description and I asked if he was okay.  She said she thought so.  A woman had spotted him on the main road right in front of the entrance of our subdivision and called him in.  She was unsure if he was hit by a car because he walked with a limp because of his hip dysplasia.  But the worker said, I think he’s fine.  She realized he was in tact and was just limping.  All the while this conversation was going on, I was so overjoyed and eager to go pick him up.  As I was getting directions from the worker as to their location, I was talking with her and crying at the same time with such a shriveled and excited voice and babbling with my lips because I just could not hold back the tears and the overwhelming emotion I felt that he was miraculously found.  That was the kiss on my face from God and to my family.  He truly kissed my pain away in an instant just like the prayers prophetically said it would happen.  Everything was according to word of the Lord.  I was so proud of my students for that, especially that our schools that we conduct are on learning how to hear the voice of God.

We immediately got in the car, brought some doggy biscuits, a blanket and zoomed out of the driveway.  When we got to the pound, sure enough it was good ol’ Bear Bear (as we call him.)  He did look very dehydrated and he even lost a few pounds.  I just couldn’t believe he survived those three days on his own out in the wilderness of neighborhoods, dangerous road and lots of forest trees.  When I saw him, I realized he never had his collar on in the first place.  There as absolutely no way that some one could turn him in from his rabies tag.  He simply didn’t have it on and all the while I was thinking someone would turn him in because of his rabies tag.  It was more of a miracle than I realized.  A woman just happened to spot Bear right when he was approaching a very dangerous road with high speed vehicles.  It was a miracle he wasn’t killed that way.  Or worse yet, hit by a car and survive the hit with excruciating pain.  That would have been the worst for him. It would have been totally devastating to find his carcass on the side of the road coming home from grocery shopping or something. That is definitely not something I wanted my kids to see or experience.  That would have been very upsetting.

I was just so amazed of God’s love that day and how he cares about even the little things in our lives.  Our pets might not mean anything to anybody else, but they sure mean something to us.  We also have a flame point Himalayan Persian whose name is Romeo and has the most beautiful white fur and biggest blue eyes.  We call him Me-Me for short.  Bear-Bear and Me-Me are a definite part of our family.  God proved to me once again and He proved to my kids of not only His tender love for us and His favor over us, but also that He also loves Bear-Bear and Me-Me.  He loves them because they are His creation but more importantly, because we love them and they are special to us.  They are apart of our family memories and fun.  God loves them because we love them.  Bears time of death of how and when was important to God because it was important to us and to our kids.  God really does honor the faith of children and I am His child too although I am the mom of the family.  I am also Bear’s and Romeo’s mommy.   God just cares about every part of our lives.

After we had Bear back in our arms, we celebrated his return with feasting and gave him lots water, food and dog treats.  And you guessed it, we gave him a nice warm bath.  He was absolutely dirty from being in the elements for three days.  You can imagine how exhausted he was. I don’t think he even slept.  I feel like he searched and searched until he found us.  That confirms why I was feeling his heart cry in the middle of the night in my intercessions the nights before.   He just has this incredible will to live and he survived.  God was with him and watching over him the whole time.  When I prayed Psalm 91 over him like I do the rest of my family, God totally honored that.  He led him home.  He put it on a woman’s heart to call the pound to turn Bear in.  Perhaps she just wanted to get a stay dog off the road or maybe she had compassion so that a car would not hit him, but either way, God used it for our good.  God works in mysterious ways and causes a chain of events to work in our favor especially when we pray.  That day, God’s love shouted out to us from the sky!

After recovering Bear from that terrible ordeal, we had lots to be thankful for during the Thanksgiving holiday and the preciousness of family, including our pets as our family.  It is just important to God and I thank God for his love and mercy for us.  We continued to discuss when the right time would be to put Bear to sleep because of his old age but Thanksgiving and Christmas was not the time.  I didn’t want the holidays to be a time when my kids remembered Bears going home.  So we continued to pray and wait for the right time.  Bear recovered from his three-day adventure pretty quickly and we enjoyed him for a little while longer.

As the holiday passed, the New Year came.  Bear’s 16^th birthday was January 5^th, 2010.  We were amazed that Bear lived long enough to see his 16^th birthday.  He was beginning to limp a little bit more and the aging process was evident that his time was near.  We noticed more and more that he started to become a little more restless through the night as he would pace the house and even whimper with some doggy cries.  We tried to comfort him as much as we could as he had good days and bad days.  We concluded he was having some pain but unsure of how much pain.  There were times he seemed quite content and then nights that he never slept at all and then kept us awake as well.  We knew his arthritis was getting worse to the point where he was having trouble getting up over the last year, but especially the last month we saw a decline.  He just had such a strong will to get up and go and it was just his nature to fight.  Chow’s are bred to fight and they just have an incredible strong will, which he had.  He wasn’t only my miracle dog but we was a warrior at heart.

http://www.vimeo.com/9474771

Then the day came.  As a family we saw that Bear was starting to get to a place where he was starting to suffer more and more.  Putting him to sleep was not an easy decision and yet we knew it was inevitable we would have to make the call sooner or later.  Then on February 5^th, 2010, we took Bear to the vet for his going home.  I was unsure if I wanted to be present when he died when they actually administered the shot.  But my 19 year old daughter wanted to be there for him so I decided to be there too for her sake.   I wasn’t sure how I was going to take that.  The last time I experienced a close death in the family was when my father died of cancer at the age of 17.   Although I was healed from all of that, I just didn’t want to see Bear die.

As it turned out, the vet decided to sedate Bear first to relax him and it gave us an opportunity to love on him and say good-bye one more time.  When he finally got the shot, he panted a little bit and he was gone within 60 seconds.  It was very painless and peaceful to say the least. It was a good call on the part of the doctor to sedate him first.  For that reason I was glad I was there with him.  She probably did that more for us.  But it was a good decision because it ensured that Bear would feel nothing at all and was just like going to sleep permanently.

My heart ached after it was all over with because I don’t have Bear roaming around the house anymore after 16 years, but I knew we did the best we could for him and he had the best going away anyone could ever have, even better than most humans.  I saw God’s hand in the whole thing.  How He cared about Bear because we did.  How God loved Bear, because we loved him.  How God loved Bear because He gave him to us in the first place.  I learned so much about God’s love through my own dog.

I definitely had questions about what would happen to Bear eternally.  I know that animals don’t need salvation like humans because they don’t sin like we do.  So it is quite normal to ask God, “Will Bear go to heaven?”  I think almost everyone that has lost a beloved pet will ask God the same question.  How do we know? I have researched and it is a controversial subject but one thing I know, is that Bear won’t go to hell.  He certainly benefited from our salvation because God granted him long life, miraculously returned him to us when he was lost, and lived a good long healthy life.  I think the main reason why Bear lived so long is because we always gave him affection.  Even when we got frustrated with him if he ever dared to do his business in the house, he was quite forgiving soon after.  We saw the love of God in Bear.  He was a unique creation.  He wasn’t human yet he had his own personality all his own and He mattered to us because he grew up with my kids and was a member of our family.

I learned that Bear was important to God because he was important to us and my kids and the lesson of God’s love through His creation is something I would have overlooked had I not this beautiful Chow for 16 years.  I think we as humans can be so cold to think that our pets are not that significant, when they really are.  Of course they are not as valuable as humans, but we certainly do love them anyway in their proper perspective.  They are members of our families and they can bring a lot of joy and healing to our human lives.

So you might ask me if I believe Bear is in heaven?  My answer is yes to that.  Not based on salvation, but based on God’s love.  Just like I believe I will see singing birds and butterflies, and beautiful flowers and trees in heaven, I believe Bear will be there with the lion and the lamb playing together as one happy family.  In fact I had a dream the night Bear died that there was this big house and I was sitting outside in the front yard on the green grass.  There was a den of lions next to the house and Bear was in there and although I didn’t see him, I knew that’s where he hung out and played.  And two large lions were on the front grass with me rolling in the grass.  I was a little apprehensive at first because I didn’t know they were going to hurt me.  As one female lion got close to me and looked at me with curiosity, I commanded her to lay down and roll over.  She did exactly that and rolled and played in the grass.  When I woke up, I realized I must have been sitting in the lawn of my own heavenly mansion enjoying the day.  One of the reasons I was always fascinated with Chow’s is because they do look so much like lions with all of their fur.  I think it is prophetic for me in some ways because it reminds me of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. I even have a large portrait of a male lion over my fireplace mantle to this day.  I suppose it is something significant to me that I feel about God and about heaven.

Bear is not with us anymore in this physical realm, but he lives in our hearts and those memories are precious to us.  He impacted our lives and this article was written in memory of him and to testify of God’s love for our family and for Bear.  I saw Bear benefit from my salvation.  The scripture says that me and my household will be saved and I think that scripture is worth looking into a little further.  If my pets can feed off the crumbs of my salvation, how much more will God save and love our loved ones and the humans in our lives that are so near and dear to us.  Just like when God said he cares for the little sparrows and the flowers of the field, I saw Him care for my Bear Bear, even to the day he dies.  If it was important to us for Bear to have a painless and peaceful going home, then it was important to God.  God just proved to me through all of this how much He really cares about every little detail of our lives.  I not only read that truth in scripture, but I see this manifested in my life in living color.  I don’t know why God loves me so much and my family and my pets.  He just does.  God is love.  He can’t help it.  And because God is love, He knows I want to see my loved one’s in heaven and that included my dog.  I know as humans we have choices.  Just like the husband is sanctified by the wife and the wife is sanctified by the husband, there are some bread crumbs from the table that our pets will benefit from.

During the first week after Bear passed away, I admit I had a hard time with heart pain and grief.  One morning I was spending time in prayer as God was ministering to me and I cried so deeply because I felt so much love for him.  There was a song in my heart that I had been hearing for several days so I decided to turn it on.  Apparently God wanted to wash over me with his love and comfort and he did just that.  He covered me with the healing balm of Gilead as he showed me in prayer a vision where Jesus was in my backyard, playing with Bear and throwing a Frisbee.  I actually saw Bear when he was younger…maybe about 3 years old at his prime.  He was a young adult dog.  I also saw that he had a glorified body.  I saw a glimpse of our existence after we die and as we are with God.  I thought of the transfiguration of Christ in the Bible and the glimpse in scripture of what our glorified bodies will be like.  I didn’t know this would be for animals too.  But soon after searching the scriptures, I saw that heaven is for non-human creation as well.  Animals have a soul spirit like we do, yet there are not sinners like humans.  They have no broken connection with the Creator.  Redemption and salvation is for us humans, yet God subjected the animal kingdom to our dominion and as a result they suffer pain, sickness and death like we do.  Not because it was their fault, but because God ordered it that way.  Romans 8:19-25 (AMP) reveals this truth:

“19 For [even the whole] creation (all nature) waits expectantly and longs earnestly for God’s sons to be made known [waits for the revealing, the disclosing of their sonship]. 20 For the creation (nature) was subjected to frailty (to futility, condemned to frustration), not because of some intentional fault on its part, but by the will of Him Who so subjected it–[yet] with the hope 21 That nature (creation) itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and corruption [and gain an entrance] into the glorious freedom of God’s children. 22 We know that the whole creation [of irrational creatures] has been moaning together in the pains of labor until now. 23 And not only the creation, but we ourselves too, who have and enjoy the firstfruits of the [Holy] Spirit [a foretaste of the blissful things to come] groan inwardly as we wait for the redemption of our bodies [from sensuality and the grave, which will reveal] our adoption (our manifestation as God’s sons). 24 For in [this] hope we were saved. But hope [the object of] which is seen is not hope. For how can one hope for what he already sees? 25 But if we hope for what is still unseen by us, we wait for it with patience and composure.”

There are a lot of people that can probably argue about our pets having souls and if the go to heaven or not.  Let those religious arguments go to waste.  Believing if our pets go to heaven is not a salvation issue.  It is based on a loving God who loves His creation and He decides what He wants to do with them, not our theology.   I trust God more than I do man’s theology.  I know God loves me and wherever Bear is, he is safe and sound and he has no more pain and is resting in peace with Jesus at this moment. He came into this world with a whole lot of love, and he left this world with a whole lot of love.  Thank you Jesus for the gift you gave us.  Forgive us for the times we ever neglected him and took him for granted.  May we learn to love our families and loved ones and fellow human beings all the more and savor the precious moments of family love all the days of our lives.  If anything, I have seen your unconditional love expressed in your creation and no one can take that treasure away from me because you have etched that into my very heart for all eternity.   I thank you and love you for that.  Give Bear a big hug for me!

In memory of Bear Mederos

January 5^th, 1994 to February 5^th, 2010

© 2010 By Reeni Mederos