The Amazing Grace of Pancho
We said goodbye to a beloved dog last Wednesday. Pancho had been our yard dog for almost fourteen years. A Chow-Terrier mix, she was an ill-proportioned dog with her thick Chow coat and her tiny feet and snout. She reminded me of a dumpy, middle-aged lady in an oversized fur coat.
My son, an attorney, wrote a beautiful eulogy for her on Facebook including the story of how she found her way to us by being in front of the right man’s truck on a dark and stormy night. My daughter, an artist, curated photos of Pancho’s best exploits which included possum-killing and confidently riding a YOLO board at Lake Martin. I smiled through tears at their tributes and thought about letting their words and pictures speak for me. After all, they’d captured her essence better than I could.
But I’ve not been able to let go of the thought this week that we all loved Pancho so much because she told us our own story.
She was probably three months old when she stepped in front of the right black pickup truck on a dark night in October. My husband, thinking she was someone’s lost puppy, stopped and got out to see about her. (I love that man!) He said as soon as he touched her he knew she had been dumped. She was mangy, skinny and not wearing a collar.
She was sick, starving, and lost and orphaned.
My husband picked her up, put in in the passenger seat of his truck, called our then-twelve-year-old daughter and said, “Meet me in the driveway with a towel.” I was on the other side of the world on a mission trip at the time. Had I been home, Pancho probably would not have become our pet, for we already had two dogs and I’m the practical one. By the time I got back from an eleven-day trip, Pancho was healing and thriving under the care of dad and daughter and she was ours - with or without my vote. I’m glad Love, and not Practicality, was at home that night.
Pancho took her place as number three in the pack behind a “handful” of a Boston Terrier in the house and a stately yellow lab in the yard whose name was Gracie. The first year or two, we hardly knew Pancho was around. Gracie’s snarl told her when she could eat, where she could patrol in the yard, and what her relationship could and could not be to each of us. She kept a low profile under Gracie’s tutelage; but once Gracie passed, Pancho grew into her identity and took authority over the front yard. She claimed that territory. If that meant standing down a coyote at the foot of the driveway at 2 a.m., so be it. She did it. She patrolled the yard regularly and scanned it with radar-like ears even as she napped under the azaleas. She guarded us from thieves, possums, squirrels, cats, and FedEx delivery drivers. She ran the borders of the yard every time one of our cars pulled up, just to be sure nothing had crossed a line to harm us on her watch.
She appreciated every meal we feed her and paid us back with humble gratitude, asking nothing of us except the privilege to live in our yard, guard our home, and greet us every time we arrived back home. We offered her dog houses and dog beds but the most she ever needed was a vehicle to crawl under for cover. Not an ounce of entitlement was in Pancho. She was all gratitude. (This cannot be said, unfortunately, for our current inside dogs.) My husband described Pancho as ‘the dog who has been the most grateful and asked the least of us’ of all the ones we’ve had.
Apparently, she never forgot she’d been rescued. Her life was one long response to what she had been given. She never forgot how hopeless she was were it not for that man in the black pickup truck who brought her home and loved her into something she never dreamed of being. Sick and starving gave way to healed and flourishing. She went from lost to found, from orphaned to belonging, from being abandoned to being greatly loved. Hers is a story of amazing grace.
As we begin Holy Week, may we remember the amazing grace that has found us. May we find ourselves in the Easter story. May we accept the invitation to come home to healing, to feasting, to flourishing, and to knowing that we are greatly loved. And may we then grow into that identity, living our lives in gratitude and claiming the territory we are given to safegaurd.
