Prayer Tip--God, Lost Dogs and Animals in Heaven

Twenty minutes can feel like a lifetime when someone you love is missing.

I just returned from visiting family over the Fourth of July. During my trip, we spent a day at St. Louis’s City Museum—a wonderful, chaotic maze of slides and climbing structures. While we were there, my brother shared a story that has stayed with me. On a previous visit to the museum several years ago, my six-year-old nephew Yadi got separated from his parents. My sister-in-law had followed him down a slide, but he slipped off at a different floor while she continued to the bottom. For twenty agonizing minutes, my brother and sister-in-law searched frantically through the museum, their hearts pounding, tears streaming, calling his name.

When they finally found Yadi, he looked up at them with surprised delight. He had no idea he was lost. He was simply playing, completely absorbed in wonder, trusting that somehow, everything would be okay. That image won’t leave me: a child so secure in love that even being lost felt like play.

How often do we find ourselves in our own kind of maze—unlike Yadi, we are lost in grief, wandering through seasons of doubt, separated from the familiar path we thought we knew? The panic sets in. The searching becomes frantic. We call out, sometimes into what feels like silence.

But even when we feel most lost, we are never actually alone in the maze. God is searching for us with the same fierce urgency my brother felt that day—calling our name, never giving up until we’re found.

And sometimes, like Yadi, we’re so held by love that even our lostness becomes a place of unexpected grace. The very wandering that terrifies us becomes the path that leads us deeper into God’s heart.

I have known the ache of losing people I couldn’t bear to lose. I have felt the hollow echo of dreams that died, the silence left by beloved pets, the way loss can leave us feeling like we’re falling through space with nothing to catch us. But in every valley of loss, in every moment of feeling utterly alone, I have discovered this: God’s love doesn’t lose track of us. Not ever. We may lose sight of the path, but we are never lost to the one who loves us most.

Whether we are wandering lost in the maze of life or sitting in the ache of who and what we’ve lost, we discover the same sacred truth: God’s love meets us exactly where we are. In our lostness, we are found. In our loss, we are held. And in both, we learn that God’s love is stronger than our fear, deeper than our pain, and more persistent than our wandering.

Whenever, wherever, you feel lost, use this prayer.