Читать книгу It’s A Miracle: Real Life Inspirational Stories, Extraordinary Events and Everyday Wonders - Richard Thomas - Страница 18

In 1993, John and Toni Sheridan shared their home in rural Virginia with a very special companion, a dog named Sailor who had been a member of the family for more than a decade.

Toni says, “I guess I loved Sailor so much because we really got him as a little pup. He was just five weeks old. We brought him up, we nourished him, and he was just closer to us than a baby.”

Sailor may have been Toni’s baby, but he was John’s best friend.

“Every time I hopped into my pickup to go somewhere,” John explains, “he’d be right there alongside me with his head on my knee.”

And then, returning from a drive one morning, Sailor waited a moment before his normal routine of jumping out the passenger side of the truck. But this time, something went wrong.

John remembers, “He hit the ground, and he let out a yip, and he just laid there. So I figured, well, in a few minutes he’ll get up and walk around, but he just laid there the way he hit the ground. And I knew darn well something had happened. He was paralyzed.”

John and Toni rushed Sailor to the local vet.

Toni continues, “The vet said he was hurt internally, and, you know, there was very little he could do. And he suggested putting him to sleep, and there’s no way we wanted that. We wanted to keep him and see what would happen.”

“So we took him home,” says John. “We put him in the bedroom there and made a nice bed for him and he just laid there. I tried to give him some water and he wouldn’t drink. I tried to give him some food and he wouldn’t eat. After two days or so, he got steadily worse. His eyes were closed half the time and I told Toni, ‘He’s paralyzed. He can’t move. So … I think tomorrow morning when the vet opens up, we’ll have to take Sailor there and put him to sleep.’”

But Toni refused to give up hope. She told John, “‘I’m going to go and say a prayer. I’m going to ask God to send us an angel.’ I prayed and I prayed and I prayed for him.”

But Sailor wasn’t getting any better. And it was killing John to watch his faithful friend suffer.

“So I looked at Sailor, and I said, ‘Well, I guess you know it’s the end.’ So I slipped off his collar, and I went out to the shed. I had a couple of dog collars from previous dogs I had, and I hung Sailor’s collar next to them. It was something I hated to do, but it brought tears to my eyes. Those three collars represented almost forty years of faithful companionship.”

The next morning, John was up an hour before taking Sailor to the vet. And that’s when something entirely unexpected happened.

John recounts, “I looked up and I saw this little brown dog coming down the driveway. She looked lost. And I looked, but there was no collar on the dog. So I said, Well, heck, she must be hungry. I took her in the house, but she wouldn’t eat anything. She started walking around the house. She walked into the bedroom where Sailor was, and she sat down right in front of Sailor, just looking at him. After a minute or so, she went up and she nudged Sailor. And believe it or not, he slowly tried to get to his feet. He was shaky as all heck. He got up and he walked to the door, and that little dog went out, and Sailor followed her out. I couldn’t believe it, that Sailor was almost ready to be put to sleep, and here he was walking around wagging his tail and all.

“So I called Toni, and she came out and she said, ‘Oh, my God, Sailor’s alive! God must have sent an angel.’”

Toni agrees. “Something happened. I don’t know what kind of angel He sent, but He sent something to get Sailor up and moving and following that little dog the way he was, and I was just overjoyed.”

But there was still the question of this stray dog. Where had it come from? And was some anxious owner desperately searching for it? John called the local radio station to report a lost dog. A few hours later, the dog’s owner called to retrieve her pet. Her name was Karen Jarett.

John explains, “She had just moved up recently from Atlanta, Georgia. They lived three or four miles away, with a big wooded section between us. The dog didn’t know this area, and ran into the woods and never came back. Something brought that dog through those woods right to my house, and right to Sailor. And in my opinion, that dog saved Sailor’s life.”

As the owner thanked John for saving her dog, she pulled a collar from her bag. And at that moment, John understood what had happened.

“She had a collar in her hand, and she put it on the dog,” John says. “And I looked at the collar and I called Toni. There was ‘Angel’ written on the name tag. Toni saw it, and she said, ‘That’s God’s angel.’”

Toni says, “I thanked God because I knew it was through Him that this happened with Sailor. And I knew that if it wasn’t for Him, this miracle would never have happened, because to me it was a miracle.”

John wonders, “How could a dog come through three or four miles of woods in a strange place? And come right up, nudge my dog, and bring him back to life? This is something that happened without any help from mankind. Something stronger than a human being saved Sailor.

“And it was that little dog.”