“With God all things are possible.” —Matthew 19 : 26

He was small, puny and sickly-looking, almost too feeble to stand on his weak legs, cowering in a dark corner of the barn. He was the runt of the litter.

“Does he have a name?” I asked. Bill sighed, “I’m a good friend of your father’s Johnny, and I don’t want to steer you wrong. I’m not even sure that pup is gonna make it.” Like me, I thought. They weren’t sure that I was going to make it, either. The previous year, at the age of thirteen, I had been diagnosed with leukemia, and I was now in remission. “Well, I’ll doggone.” Bill said, as the dog bounded over to me. “He never did that before. He’s such a shy, scared pup, ‘fraid of everything and everybody.”

“We have something in common,” I said wryly, more to myself than to Bill. As I bent down and stroked the pup, I felt the strong connection surge through me. “Does he have a name?” I asked again. “Miracle,” said Bill grimly. “Cause it sure is one that he’s still alive. He was so sick the first few weeks.” “I’ll take him.”

I left the barn with Miracle cuddled in my arms. I wasn’t called stubborn for nothing.

Over the years, Miracle proved that first appearances can be deceiving. He learned to be as feisty as me. There were precarious times in both of our lives, but we endured them together and triumphed over adversity. We survived. Were ever a boy and his dog so connected as Miracle and me? He walked me to school along the rural roads of Maine. He was promptly outside the school building at 3 P.M. to escort me home. He slept at the foot of my bed, and his sleeping patterns matched mine exactly.

“We are bonded forever, and we will be together always,” I often fancifully told my Miracle, and he would wag his tail as if he knew exactly what I said. “Forever” came to a crashing halt four years later, as I was accepted to a prestigious university in Boston. “What am I going to do about Miracle?” I wondered aloud to my mother one day. “You have no choice” my mother said. “You’ll have to leave him behind, but you’ll see him on Christmas vacation and at Easter.” My heart was heavy with grief as I said my final farewell to Miracle the day I left home. “When I call, I’ll have Mom put your ear to the receiver so you can hear my voice,” I told him. But I never got the chance because the day after I left, Miracle left too.

When I came home for Christmas, Easter, and the summer holidays, I went looking for Miracle. I walked the streets of my little town, anxiously asking everyone I encountered: “Have you seen my dog Miracle?” But no one had seen him.

One year later, I was in my dorm room at the university thinking about Miracle, when my roommate turned to me with a puzzled look, “what’s that noise?” he demanded, scowling. “Like….a peculiar scratching sound…Listen, don’t you hear it, now?” I raced to the door and flung it wide open. He rushed into my arms with little whimpering cries, and I hugged him tight. There was no flesh on his skeletal frame, and his fur was matted with grime. His eyes looked dull and feverish, and his stance was unsteady. “This is your dog that disappeared a year ago in Maine?” demanded my roommate with incredulity. “How could that be? How could the dog travel so many hundreds of miles in all kinds of weather and survive?….But more important ….how did he find his way to you in Boston? How is that possible?”

“Anything is possible,” I whispered. “My God,” my roommate shouted, “it’s a miracle.”

“No,” I corrected him, “it is Miracle and he’s staying with me for good.”

John Nugent, the author of this story, learnt a valuable lesson that has stayed with him all his life.

With God all things are possible. He watches over us and all His creatures in wonderful ways. John discovered the truth of this when Miracle came scratching on his door in Boston, a year after he left him hundreds of miles away in rural Maine.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy