The Casey Dog Story (How God used a stray dog to help save me!)

This is a true story of how God used a stray dog to show an atheist His love and the way to Him.

In the summer of 2001, my world fell apart. My worst fear at the time was coming true right before my tear-blinded eyes: my husband and soul mate of nearly 13 years was leaving me. It was literally my worst fear coming true – worse than rape, worse than drowning, worse than death. I had no god, there was no heaven or hell or spiritual realm in my world. My life revolved around this man, and in my mind, we were made for each other and I loved him with every fiber of my being. How the situation had come to this was completely beyond my understanding. I couldn’t comprehend how he thought that there was a better life somewhere out there than the one we shared. And yet he was packing his bags.

We had only moved to Nashville in 1999, and I didn’t have a great many friends yet. Those who I told about my divorce were appropriately sad and apologetic, but uncomfortably didn’t know what to say. My family members reactions ranged from “gosh, I’m sorry, dear”, to “good riddance, he wasn’t good enough for you anyway,” none of which were helpful to me. It became clear to me that people just don’t have the tools to help each other most of the time. I had nowhere to turn; I felt like no one was there for me.

On a hot July day when my soon-to-be ex was out to take a load of belongings to his new apartment, I sat in the living room of our condo in Ashland City staring at the wall, mind numb. A soft sound at my front door, like something had lightly bumped up against it, brought me temporarily back to the present. I looked at the door, not sure if I had really heard something, and then I heard it again – a soft bump on the door. The curiosity got me out of my stupor for a minute, and I got up to crack the door open to see what was there. On the doorstep was a yellow dog, sitting looking up at me. A flea-infested, tick-ridden, dirty, smelly yellow dog. I sighed, and shut the door.

At the time, Cheatham County had no animal control at all. Stray dogs were very common (at least once a month I’d see one that had been killed by a car on Highway 12 during my commute to Nashville), and unfortunately many of the local residents also just let their dogs run at large. Various mutts would wander through the condo complex pretty regularly, and after a day or two, would disappear, or worse. Although I am an animal lover, the situation in Cheatham County was so pervasive, in the six months I had been living there, I had resigned myself to the fact that there was little I could do to help these dogs, and the yellow dog on my doorstep was just another one.

But this dog didn’t go away. When I dragged my sorrow-wracked body out the door to go to work in the morning, he’d come scooting out from underneath my car, where he’d taken shelter for the night. I didn’t touch him, due to the motor oil slick he’d then have down his dorsal line, head to tail. When I was gone, he would sleep in the bushes in front of my unit during the day to try to keep out of the sun, and in the evening when I arrived home, would come bouncing out with a big smile on his face, happy and excited for no discernable reason when I pulled up in front of my door. I just ignored him and went inside to resume crying.

After a few days or a week of the dog inexplicably living outside my unit, my neighbor in the condo right next to mine told me she was feeding the dog, as she was an animal-lover too, and felt sorry for him. Ah ha, I thought, that’s why he’s still here. But why, then, doesn’t he go sleep under HER car at night and deliver fleas and ticks to HER doorstep? Whatever, I didn’t really care. My husband was now officially moved-out, and all I could see was my pain. I lay on the floor of my condo, crying off and on, trying to get my heart to stop beating by sheer force of will. But it didn’t work.

Around the end of the second week that the dog had been “with us”, my neighbor started telling me that we “really ought to do something about the dog”, and she couldn’t take him in because of allergies or something… whatever would we do? So I finally cracked. I went to the store and bought some anti-flea-and-tick dog shampoo, and got a bunch of old towels ready in my bathroom, and then went outside and picked up the dog and carried him upstairs and threw him in the tub. I scrubbed what seemed like millions of fleas and ticks off of him, chasing the disgusting insects all over my bathroom and picking them off my own body, every gross bloated tick that I stepped on or smashed leaving a blood slick on the floor, walls, and doors. I smeared blood and insects all over my towels and clothes as I blotted the dog off, and to my dismay saw that I had only gotten maybe 50% of the parasites off of him. But that was all I had energy for that day, and so I picked him up again (he was NOT going to set foot on my carpet!) and hauled him downstairs and threw him back outside.

A couple of days later, I repeated the flea-and-tick bath, this time getting maybe 75% of them off of the dog, and again threw the dog back outside. A couple of days after that, I repeated the bath adventure again, and this time he came out reasonably clean – probably 95% flea-and-tick free. So I let him walk out of the bathroom under his own power, and let him look around my house while I cleaned up our mess.

He was an awfully well-mannered and calm stray dog. He carefully sniffed around my house, and always came to me when I talked to him. He followed me downstairs, and after looking around a bit, laid down on the middle of the living room floor. Air conditioning was a wonderful and welcome thing for him, I’m sure. Over the next few days, I started letting him into my condo when I was home, during evenings and mornings, but making him stay outside again at night and during the day when I wasn’t home. I bought him a collar and a leash, and tried taking him on walks – and lo, he walked on a leash like an expert, staying to my left, heeling close at my side, leash slack. He knew basic commands – sit, stay, come. Shortly thereafter I started letting him stay in my unit with me all the time, and his manners amazed me. He never barked, never jumped on people, never pottied in the house, never got into the trash, never chewed anything. He was friendly with everyone we met, and LOVED to ride in the car, sitting composed and mature in the passenger-side front seat, never pawing, barking, or sticking his head out the window. He was the perfect little angel.

He MUST have an owner somewhere, I thought. I spread word-of-mouth around my condo complex and the local community that I had taken in “the yellow dog” (they all knew which one – Ashland City is pretty small), and that if anyone knew who owned him to call me. After a few weeks, no one claimed to know anything about where the dog had come from. Although he had adjusted to my condo like he had lived there his whole life, I thought surely he would be better off with a family to play with and a yard to run in. I was now single, depressed and crying often, had no yard, and was gone at work 10-12 hours per day on the days that I could get my lifeless body out of bed. The still-unnamed dog would be better off with someone else.

Some try-our-phone-service company had recently sent me a small, cheap digital camera for free. I used it to take a few grainy and washed-out pictures of the dog, and placed an ad on the internet: “Free to a Good Home.” I soon got several calls from people wanting the cute smiling pooch. One lady said “she had 10 acres of land all natural and wooded and he could run out there as much as he pleased.” I politely (I think) told her that this dog seemed to really want to be indoors with human company, and seemed to have no inclination to run at large by himself. Another guy said the dog looked like a retriever in the pictures (which he did – I was guessing he was at least part Golden Retriever, although he was mixed with something smaller) and asked if I thought he would make a good huntin’ dog. Not really, I explained. After a few more calls, I talked to a nice family that lived in Nashville, two parents and two kids, that wanted an indoor companion dog. They came to my house to see the dog, and fell in love with him. The kids were well-behaved, and obviously had been around animals before – they didn’t pull the dog’s tail or anything amateurish like that. I agreed to let them take the dog.

But he didn’t want to go. When I handed the family his leash and they opened their car door, he hung his head and looked up at me with long droopy puppy-dog eyes. I asked the dog to get in their car, and he refused (a first since I’d known him, given his love for car-rides) – he just sat there looking sad. I apologized and told the people that this was a little unusual for him, he usually would bounce right into my car at the slightest hint of even going to the gas station and back, and surely he’d adjust to his new home with them in a flash. But I also told them that I was not trying to push any old dog onto them… if this dog turned out to not be right for their family and they weren’t happy with him, they could call me and I’d take him back and continue looking for the best home for him. I honestly wanted this loyal little doggie to have a good family. With that, I picked up the dog and put him in their back seat with the kids. He continued to look sadly at me out the window as they drove away.

A few days later, sure enough, the family called me. They said the dog was misbehaving badly, growling at their children, refusing to obey commands, and chasing their cat. I was astonished – I had never seen the dog do ANYTHING non-angelic during the weeks that I had kept him. I apologized profusely to them, and told them I would come get the dog right away. I got off work early, and drove straight to the family’s house. As I was pulling up in their driveway, they must have seen me and recognized my car, because the front door began to open. As I parked and stepped out of my vehicle, the dog came bounding out of the house, running full-tilt towards me, a huge floppy-tongue smile on his face. He skidded to a stop at my feet, and began excitedly rolling around on the ground in front of me, kicking his legs in the air and panting with excitement. Then suddenly he popped back onto his feet, and leapt into my open driver’s side door, bouncing neatly over the center arm rest and assuming his customary position in the passenger side seat. He sat there wagging his tail (and his whole backside), with a look on his face that clearly said “Yay! Can we go home now?”

So that day, I accepted the fact that I had a dog. I told my co-workers the story about trying to give him away, and they said yep, it was clear: I had been “chosen.” Animals do that sometimes, they said, animals just “know.” Well, what d’ya think of ‘dem apples, I thought to myself. Here I was, wishing my life would somehow end, trying to divest myself of responsibilities just in case by some fortunate twist of fate my life did end, and now this dog was here, thinking the world of me. Rats, I couldn’t off myself to end my misery after all; the dog was so sweet, and would so clearly be unhappy if I was gone.

I had been living alone for the first time in my life for something like 6 or 8 weeks now, and was really feeling the loneliness. I was so glad the dog (who I was referring to as “Doggie”) was there with me… I cried in his warm fur almost nightly, and took comfort in his calm demeanor. Deciding that, since I had to stay alive, I might as well try to do something with myself, I tentatively signed up to an online dating website to see if I could get myself out of the house to do something fun and join the world of the living again. After a few weeks, I agreed to go on a date with a guy with whom I had emailed back and forth on the site. We met at a neutral restaurant, and had a really nice evening together. I felt comfortable enough to let him meet me at my condo for the next date. When the guy met my dog (of course, I had told this guy the story about “finding” the pooch), his eyes lit up and he sat down on the ground scrubbing the dog’s ears. “This is the best dog!” he exclaimed. “You should name him ‘Casey’! He looks like a Casey!” I lifted an eyebrow at him, not getting how he could be so sure that “Casey” was the right name for my dog, but then it reminded of one of my favorite childhood rhymes, of “Casey at the Bat,” the baseball poem by Ernest Thayer. Ok, good enough, I thought, “Casey” it is.

The guy and I didn’t date any more after that… it turned out he was in the middle of a job-related relocation and wouldn’t be in the area much longer. I told my brother on the phone one day about how this guy had chosen the name “Casey” for my dog, and my brother said “well, sometimes people come into your life like that. They’re there for one purpose, and then they’re gone. His purpose was evidently to finally give your dog a name.”

So I went back to sitting at home alone, wallowing in memories of my former life, stuck in the mire of depression. Then 9/11 happened. The unbelievable horror of watching it and the aftermath on television brought the flood of my own sorrowful emotions, which I had been at least attempting to curb recently, rushing to the surface again. I felt like I, at least to some extent, knew what it must feel like to suddenly and unexpectedly lose a loved one, and to have that loss crush your heart. As I watched the names of the deceased scroll up the tv screen, and I cried and cried, for their losses, for my loss, and for this cruel world in which life is so fragile and can be taken away in an instant for no reason. Casey lay on the futon next to me, with his head in my lap, and I was so glad he was there.

Little by little, over the next year, I worked on reinventing my life. I started going to counseling – a friend had recommended a counselor at a local church, and she assured me that the counselor wouldn’t condemn me for being an atheist and would simply give me good counseling. She was right, and it helped. I attempted dating a few more times, and tried to find ways to keep myself busy. I found an ultimate Frisbee pick-up game Sunday afternoons at a local park, and even signed up for some Tae Kwon Do lessons, trying to figure out my identity. And I took LOTS of long walks with Casey. Casey was my constant companion nearly everywhere I went. When I had to work late at the office, I came home at 5:00 sharp, walked Casey for an hour or so, and then took Casey with me back to the office, where he dozed underneath my desk until I stopped working between 9 and 10 pm. When I had to go to the post office, Casey went with me and stood in line with me, showing the other patrons what it looked like to be truly patient. We took lots of long walks at the Warner Parks, all over the trails, even getting verifiably lost a time or two. We walked around the condo neighborhood, and around Ashland City’s old historic railroad trails, and we walked around downtown Nashville, Riverfront Park, Centennial Park, and Bi-Centennial Mall Park. We even joined an organization for service animals, and Casey, with zero effort, passed all of the necessary training tests and got us certified with the Delta Society as a therapy team, allowing us to do volunteer work visiting local nursing homes and critical care facilities. This little yellow dog was there for me, every minute that I needed him, and he helped me re-build my life.

Fast forward a few years, and I began dating a man who, I learned on our first date, was a Christian, and uniquely, he didn’t mind when I told him I was an atheist. We began dating regularly, and were getting along quite well. He hadn’t been attending a church in recent months, but one day, he asked me if I wanted to go with him to visit a small, relatively young church where he knew some friends. Now, for me, churches had always been intimidating and untrustworthy places for reasons we needn’t go into here, but at this point in time, I paused.

It had occurred to me recently that Casey’s appearance on my doorstep and his insistence on staying close by my side through thick and thin over the past couple of years might not have been a coincidence. One of my aunts regularly called Casey my “angel,” and suddenly, that seemed like an accurate assessment. There’s no telling whether I would have committed suicide or permanently messed up my life in some other way if Casey wasn’t there to help me during that most difficult time. In fact, I decided, the uncanny timing of everything and the gift that Casey had become to me could not have been a coincidence. Good gracious: what if there really IS a God?

So I agreed to go with Jeff to visit the Franklin Vineyard Church, which was meeting in the conference room of a local motel. Jeff introduced me to various people, and everyone was quite friendly and welcoming. They sang some upbeat Christian songs, and I sat and listened to the sermon, which I didn’t really understand. At the end, everyone hugged each other and started chatting animatedly, and a few women came over to me to welcome me to the church again. One lady asked why I had come. Well, I started to say, Jeff knew some people here and he wanted to visit…. but she interrupted me. “No,” she asked again, “why did YOU come?” “My dog,” I answered, and I told them the Casey story. They nodded throughout, a couple women close to tears, and they said “See, God loves you so much, He knew just what you needed.” I couldn’t deny it. They were right.

We continued to attend the Franklin Vineyard for about 2 years, and during that time, the patient and loving people there educated me about God and Jesus and the Bible, and they prayed for me, and thanked the Lord for sending Casey into my life. Learning the true heart of God put my new life into focus and perspective for me, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that He had given me Casey and that Casey had led me to Him. I was baptized in April of 2005, and Jeff and I were married in October of 2005.

After my life was solidly rebuilt anew and God felt I was ready, He took Casey home in July of 2010. The little stray dog will never be forgotten - Casey touched so many lives in addition to mine. All the folks at the nursing home that we visited looked forward to his smiling face. My co-workers loved having his uplifting and stress-busting fluffiness around the office. He converted Jeff from a no-pets-allowed, iron-fist landlord into a bona-fide pet lover and dog-cuddler. Everywhere we went, people were drawn to Casey and wanted to love on him and pet him. He always brightened people’s day, lifted you up if you were down, and always showed love. And most of all, he was my angel and loyal, God-sent friend. My Lord used Casey to save me, and I cannot thank Him enough!

Psalm 50:10-11 (New International Version)