[Note: This is the prepared text of a #4 Add Color Speech given to the Spokesman’s Club for the United Church of God congregation in Portland, Oregon on Sabbath, April 5, 2025.]

I have not had many pets over the course of my life, but I would like to share a story about one of them. When I was a toddler growing up in Western Pennsylvania, about the age of two or three, I adopted a stray red and white haired and freckled Brittany Spaniel whom I named Tagger because he followed me around. This particular dog was apparently a comfort to my father for five years when he was unable for various reasons to see his sons, and lived until I was a teenager when he died at about the age of fifteen or sixteen or so after a long life of being a good dog. That said, a long life for Tagger was only fifteen or sixteen years, and the vast majority of animals that people have for pets live far shorter lives than we do. Owning a pet and raising children to love pets, as is common for us, is a recipe for teaching children about the death of beloved fellow creatures. What is the value of that? While the subject of death, whether in the animal world or the human world, is far too large for us to deal with in a short speech like this one, I can think of at least a couple reasons why it is worthwhile for us to learn about death, even from the death of pets.

The first is simple enough, and that is that we should remember that we too will die. There are many people who grow up thinking that they are immortal and will always be strong, healthy, and impervious to what life has to throw at them, not realizing that human beings are a pretty feeble lot for the most part. In understanding the world around us and how it works, we can gain at least some understanding that youth, vitality, strength, good health, and other such blessings are all too temporary. Our lives are but a vapor that quickly vanishes. We are like grass that grows in the morning and is cut down all too quickly. And if that is true of us, whose lives are usually measured in decades, unless for some reason we should either live a century or be cut off before the usual time, that is even more true for the pets we let into our lives whose span of life is often far shorter than our own.

One might think that the obvious solution to knowing that we and everyone around us, human and animal, has an expiration date would lead us not to love at all, but that would be to miss the larger point. We have eternity in our hearts. We know that death is not the way things should end for us. We rebel against the inevitability of our decline and our demise. One some level, we know that we were made to live forever, and we are right. God created us in love and in hope that we would accept His call, repent of our sins, and walk according to His ways, so that we may receive the gift of eternal life and live as we know deep down we ought to live. And if God loves us despite knowing our short lifespan and the futility and trouble of our existence, surely we too can love in that same knowledge. For as short as our lives are, they are far too precious to be lived without love.