My wife runs a home for wayward felines. She takes in abandoned cats, diseased kittens, and mom’s with litters, fostering them until they can find a forever home. While my wife’s obsession occasionally causes marital conflicts, it is also the reason why I love her so much. She has a heart for God’s creation. She is the sworn enemy of natural selection offering asylum for innocents caught in the evolutionary cross-fire. Why does she do it? She does it because she cannot look the other way when that which God calls “good” suffers and dies.

A Godless view of the universe offers no warrant for fostering cats, coaxing beached whales back out to sea, breeding near-extinct species, or trying to toss bread crumbs to the smaller, weaker ducks at the back of the pond. However, a world in which God spoke “good” animals into existence leaves us no choice but to treasure His every word.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. (Genesis 1: 24-25)

Whenever I offer reasons for not being the proprietor of a cat-house, my wife opens up the good book to the first chapter and points out that my “very good” duty is to care for that which God calls “good.”

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Genesis 1: 28)

In a culture where God is either banished or pushed to the periphery we still need to hear His words. So we travel to mountains, forests, and beaches because they are the amphitheaters that offer the best divine acoustics. Unfortunately, the necessities of life often trap us in concrete jungles where our man-made noise reverberates and drowns out God’s divine discourse. We find this situation intolerable because a life without a word from God is unlivable. So we bring pets into our homes and apartments because we need to be reminded that in a world of stress and anxiety there is actually something “good” that we can cling to.

Isn’t it interesting that in a society where anxiety, depression, and suicide is on the rise, we have also seen a rise in the use of pet therapy? Why would the low hanging fruit on the evolutionary tree be therapeutic for the most highly evolved creature? Why is a pet better than a pill for emotional healing? In a materialistic universe, sadness is just an imbalance between happy and sad chemicals, and the appropriate treatment is more chemicals. However, if our sadness is because we experience too much bad in our lives then maybe a therapeutic “good” word is the best medicine.

A universe devoid of God’s words is a lonely place, but a world filled with divine dialogue means we are never alone. A world that often seems so bad is actually filled with millions of “good” reminders of God’s creative grace. When one of God’s “good” words sleeps by our head at night, sits in our lap while we watch TV, or goes on a walk with us, we are reminded that the world actually has a lot of good things to say. Maybe we would take God a bit more seriously if we recognized that pet therapy is really just divine speech therapy.

*My wife approved this message.