Man’s Best Friend

Teeth bared, hair raised, snarling and leaping in and out snapping at each other’s necks, the two rival packs of street dogs battled in our front yard and us little boys were about to be trapped in the middle of a literal dogfight.

Man’s best friend. Playful, cuddly, loyal protective dogs. The phrase likely began in the west and not south Asia where stray dogs sometimes feel ubiquitous. Our little mountainside town in Pakistan was no different. And unfortunately it’s not a bunch of puppy-chowed Golden Retrievers running around with shiny coats but most often mangey, many colored mutts of unknown lineage. The most common trait is their tails that curve up and over their behind at an angle. They roam the streets looking for food and keeping people awake barking at night.

But Pili was our stray dog. Pili meaning “yellow” in Urdu and Hindi. She was a mild mannered dog that lived around our property. She wasn’t our pet but I suppose she was as close to being a pet to us as our parents would allow a stray dog to get, if that makes sense. She was friendly to us and us three brothers were friendly to her. So much so that Pili had a name while the other strays remained nameless. The tearful but touching end to that story was finding Pili dead on our doorstep when we returned home from church one sunny Sunday. She knew we were her people. My dad buried her and that was one of the first real life lessons I remember on death and burial.

I don’t remember if she was involved in this particular turf war or if she was even part of our lives at the time, but in the midst of the barking chaos, as fear gripped my tiny toddler heart, my eldest brother of just a few years grabbed us too younger ones out of the fray and backed us into the corner. He stood between us and the dueling dogs as our protector. He opened his umbrella and we crouched behind him and his shield on the edge of safety until our parents arrived.

My brother was quite literally in our corner, he stepped in to protect us when he was really not that much bigger than us and no match for angry, territorial dogs. Who do you have in your corner? Who is your best friend, your faithful friend? Who have you surrounded yourself with who will step in in your hour of need? Is it family? Or a friend? Or have you burnt bridges along the way and struggle to think of names you would call upon?

Family, at its ideal in God’s design, is there for you. “A brother is born for adversity” (Proverbs 17). Friends also help to bear the load, “a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4). But what if you are someone without a family, or with a dysfunctional family or a family that lives far away? Or what if you don’t have any friends or just haven’t made close friends yet? What if I’m a friendless orphan? Who is in my corner?

The truth is you can spend years putting down roots and building a support network but you could still lose it fast in a disaster or even just a new job in a new town. What if you spent years and resources prepping yourself and your family to not need anyone in your corner and to be self-sufficient in a disaster? Still, an unforeseen scenario or just rotten luck can unbalance even the greatest preppers.

Over the years living far from family in boarding school or just having family live across the globe as missionaries or in the military, caused me to lean into friends as family in a lot of ways. Not that my family have grown emotionally distant just practically speaking, like scripture says, “Better is a friend who is near than a brother who is far away” (Proverbs 27).

But regardless of all of that, whether you have someone with an umbrella shielding you from dogs or you find yourself face to face with their snarls, there is someone we can all count on to swoop in and rescue us. Even my brother with his umbrella could only protect us for so long, it took my parents rushing into the melee to lift us out. We need a parent, a Heavenly Father to save us. Proverbs 18 says “...there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” That is the kind of friend we all long to have. But I have always thought it referred to people we meet throughout life. While I think that’s mostly true, I think the friend who sticks closest is Jesus. There are some things in this life that only someone beyond this world can save us from, be it a disaster or ourselves.

Jesus is man’s best friend. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15). And that’s exactly what Jesus did for us. He calls us His friends and He gave is life for us so that we too could have life and have it abundantly. Maybe you have a dog like Pili in your life, or maybe you have a brother ready to stand between you and danger. But just remember that Jesus doesn’t say He loves you so much He is willing to give His life for you, He loves you so much that He already has. And He did it while we were His enemies.

I’m not trying to step on any paws here, but the promise of a pampered pet or a squalid stray as “man’s best friend” should just point us to the deeper reality of who is truly going to lay down their life for us.

Thanks for reading,

Seth.

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