Foley and the Dog Who Returned Home After Eleven Years

Within the first month of being at Rainbow Bridge, an angel has to go to the Prayer Clearing House.  This is where all unanswered prayers are stored. A new angel enters the database and clears out all their prayers, so another angel assigned to cold case prayers (those that have not been answered for five years) does not work on a current angel's prayers.  Working on cold case prayers is monotonous and unfulfilling. But, occasionally, it is gratifying for the one saying the prayers and the angels hearing them.   

When I was recently assigned to the cold prayers unit, I found some from 2007.  A woman was praying for a dog who had snuck out of her house when her oldest son was leaving for school.  The pup did not come home. She prayed for him constantly every day for a year and kept him in her nightly prayers since then.  I figured the dog was here at the Bridge, but there was no record of him. I opened the prayers from the dog's database and began to search.  I didn’t expect to find anything. Usually, in these instances, the dogs found a new home and stopped praying. I was about to abandon my search when I saw the prayers of a dog in Pittsburgh who was out in the cold, pleading to go back at his Florida home. 

I planned to check this little dog out.  The other angels told me I was foolish. It had been eleven years.  But I am an optimist. I found her in a parking lot in Pittsburgh 1,200 miles from her home. I showed her the picture that accompanied the woman's prayers.  “That’s her, that’s my mom!” she said excitedly. This was unprecedented! I immediately made sure that the little dog was found by rescuers and brought her to animal control. 

That is when I got lucky.  Not only was this little dog microchipped, but her mom had been paying to keep the chip active, refusing to lose hope.  No one was more surprised than she was to learn her little missing dog was alive in the northeast and was waiting to be picked up.  Her mom got the first flight she out and brought back home the dog she had named Duchess 11 years ago. 

That night I went into Duchess’ dreams and found out where she had been for the last eleven years.   She told me she was recruited from her home to work as director of the Florida campaign headquarters for Mitt Romney.  From there, she finished third on the Apprentice and was asked to join Seal Team Six, where she served as a scout for the team that took out Osama Bin Laden.  She retired from the military and used her training to make sure the Corgis did not act out of line during the Queen’s jubilee. 

After that, she reentered the army at considerable risk to herself to get information on Korea’s nuclear program.  She was the original Lafayette in Hamilton and won a Tony. She returned to England to steer the country through Brexit but grew frustrated dealing with Boris Johnson, so she returned to the States. At that point, she yearned to return home and get back together with her family.  She said a prayer and counted on a miracle. 

Luckily for her, there are miracles aplenty, none bigger than her mom still paying to keep her chip active for eleven years, clinging to the slimmest of hopes that The Duchess could be found. 



It goes to prove the longer you hold on to hope; the more likely a miracle is to occur.