Overview: Throughout this episode of the DOGgone Truth Podcast, Dr. Bloomer touches on the significance of interpreting signs and messages, expressing unwavering faith in the eternal reunion with animals. Her reflections extend to the deep bond with her dogs, underlining the invaluable lessons learned from them and the remarkable impact of animal recoveries. The narrative is woven with a strong emphasis on personal growth, advocating for the choice to embrace challenges as catalysts for growth and speaking positively about one’s aspirations.
Here is Part One if you’ve not read or listened to this one yet: https://www.aspenbloompetcare.com/2024/01/unveiling-the-profound-journey-of-canine-redemption/
The following is the full story transcription from this podcast episode with edits:
“The student said, what happens if I fail? And the teacher replied, what happens if you don’t even try?” ~Author Unknown
This week we’re going to do a little shorter one than last week, but it is part two of From Neglect to Redemption: a Dane-sized Transformative Tale. I realized that I had not finished explaining all about the spotted Great Danes. This time we’re going to go into that just a little bit more so we can have the fullness of this story. I hope you enjoy. Thomas Jefferson said, “Nothing can stop the man with the right mental attitude. Nothing on earth can help the man with the wrong mental attitude.”
So, I wanted to go back through what I didn’t complete last week. I want to start with a couple of things. Why did I mix the story of my Great Dane Leben with the dreams about the spotted Great Danes? If you’ll recall, I had three dreams in a week’s period of time, and they meant something. I believe they were a message from the Lord, as I can tell the difference now between just my mind processing daily events in dreams over dreams that have meaning from the Lord. It’s taken a lot of years to get to this, but I’m glad as I’ve been searching those out and can tell. One thing I want to say first, though, before we go into this, is we can stay stuck in the past or relinquish that to the Lord and move forward into our future. My husband’s aunt who raised him always used to say, there is no future in your past. We can embrace all we’ve learned, forgive ourselves and others and go forward. I will always, always, always love and remember Lebanon. He is always with me, and I know one day I’ll see him again, and I know there will be no regrets, as it will all be in the past, and we will be together in eternity. I truly believe that our animals are there; ALL animals are there. Scripture mentions animals from Genesis to Revelation, so they’re there. Let me just go back to talking about the spotted Great Danes.
As I had been thinking about those dreams, I kept wondering, why am I dreaming about these? I’ve never had those kinds of Great Danes. I’m attracted to all Great Danes. The color doesn’t really matter to me. Leben was a fawn, Meshach was an onyx brindle, a gorgeous boy. They both were, and yet I’ve liked them all. Black and white, the harlequins and the mantles, all of them. The blues, the blacks, you name it, I love all of them.
I can’t see one without being attracted to them. It’s kind of like when I see horses. I can’t see them and not take a deep breath, you know, kind of suck in my breath. It’s just the way it’s been with me all my life. As I stated previously, Leben was my first Dane, and I was only 17. I’m not sure why the breeder trusted me, but that’s in the story itself, and you know, I think she learned a lot from that experience. So, let’s go back to Genesis chapter 30, verse 32, where Jacob is saying, (and I paraphrase here), “Look, Laban (interesting how this story has a Leben and a Laban in it), I’ve worked for you for 14 years. First, I thought I was getting Rachel, and you deceived me by giving me Leah, her older sister, and then I worked another seven years to get Rachel, and now, you just keep flipping my wages on me all over the place.”
He was nice about it, the way he said it. So, they’re going back and forth in a dialogue, which you can read from verse 25 all the way down to the end of this chapter, and now Jacob is just saying, “I’ve served you, and your livestock has done so well. The Lord has blessed you and increased you abundantly. You didn’t have much when I came to you, but now you have a ton, so I really need to take care of my own household now,” and then Laban is saying to him, “Well, what shall I give you?”
And he says, you shall not give me anything. I’m reading from verse 31 right now. Jacob says, “You shall not give me anything. If you will do this for me, I will again pasture your flock and keep it, but let me pass through all your flock today, removing from it every speckled and spotted sheep and every black lamb and the spotted and speckled among the goats, and they shall be my wages. So, my honesty will answer for me later when you come to look into my wages with you. Every one that is not speckled and spotted among the goats and black among the lambs, if found with me, shall be counted stolen.” And Laban said, “Good, let it be as you have said,” but that day Laban removed the male goats that were striped and spotted and all the female goats that were speckled and spotted and every one that had white on it and every lamb that was black and put them in charge of his sons. And he set a distance of three days journey between himself and Jacob, and Jacob pastured the rest of Laban’s flock. And it goes on to say how then Jacob took fresh sticks of poplar and almond and plane trees and peeled white streaks in them, exposing the white of the sticks. He set the sticks that he had peeled in front of the flocks in the troughs, that is the watering places where the flocks came to drink. And since they bred when they came to drink, the flocks bred in front of the sticks. And so, the flocks brought four striped, speckled and spotted. And Jacob separated the lambs and set the faces of the flocks toward the striped and all the black in the flock of Laban. He put his own droves apart and did not put them with Laban’s flock.
So, he continued to go on very wisely, strategically, even though Laban had stolen from him yet again. And it didn’t stop him. He just kept right on going from what he had learned. And he was blessed tremendously, like an abundant provision. I wasn’t even thinking about this particular verse in scripture at all, when I started wondering why do I keep dreaming about these spotted Great Danes and speckled-spotted Great Danes? Why? And then that verse just came into my head. Well, I know the Lord is with me and He’s answering me and I’m like, whoa.
So, I went and looked up the scripture and this has been on my mind ever since. Ever since I shared with you in last week’s episode and now this episode. I am still processing all this. But what does it mean? It means that even though Jacob was stolen from, he worked hard all those years and he continued to do what he had learned in his farming and rearing of animals, and it prevailed for him. Laban did everything by cheat and greed.
It’s sad. He was still blessed because he was under the mantle of Jacob, that God was blessing Jacob in the process, but he was also growing him up to be the man who would be the leader of the 12 tribes of which he later was renamed Israel. So, it just spoke to me about all these things that I’ve done wrong, and Jacob had done wrong when we were younger. Then when Jacob got the right mental attitude, as Thomas Jefferson said, nothing was going to stop him from going forward because he didn’t hold onto it. I mean, he had two wives. He had all these children now and that is considered a blessing in ancient times. And it seems to be like that’s becoming more and more evident today too. Very cool. So what I took away from it for myself was even though I’ve gone through these hard things, the Lord speaking to me through Great Danes was a really good thing – a really good sign to me.
There’re always animals in my dreams, like always. So, it’s really, really awesome when He shows me something specific like this and it was repetitive. In scripture, when it’s repetitive, the Lord is really, really trying to get our attention on that. I want to go to a scripture as well that spoke about wealth, because that seems to be like, ooh, you’re not going to do the prosperity gospel, are you? If you would look up how many times that is taught and brought up by the Lord, you might be amazed. It’s important to Him for our sakes and His glory.
It says here in Deuteronomy 8:18, “You shall remember the Lord, your God, for it is He who gives you power to get wealth, that He may confirm His covenant that He swore to your fathers as it is this day.” A lot of this is coming up because of what’s happening with the economy and so forth. That’s why I really felt like this was an important message to share. And what better way to share it than through the love of animals? I started looking up blog posts, and more about truth, since it’s what this podcast is about, and the words we use really do matter.
I came across a post I wrote back in February of 2016. That’s almost eight years ago. And it was with my beautiful Carolina dog, Schatzie my female, and then my American Bully King. Ours, I should say, mine and my husband’s. So I’m going to share from this a little bit what I wrote. It was a little bit of a mixed bag, and the title of it was Worthy of the Truth. I wrote, “well, this is a mixed bag. At least it’s not a bag of kibble”. And I felt it needed to be so the message would be really heard because it’s about how worthy of the truth are our dogs. I just start out with my short and weird animal girl scenario, as I have been called that over the years since I was a child.
And I decided I was going to own that. That’s who I am. And the tribe, there’s a whole lot of tribe of us that are WAGs, weird animal girls, and guys. So, I just said, let me start out with my short and goofy weird animal girl scenario first because I think it shows how important, precious, and special our relationships with our dogs are to us. And I would add in there, animals. Because they can be a bird, horse, dog, cat, and we can have these amazing relationships with them. They’re extremely brilliant, as we all know. We just like to think we’re so much smarter when we have a lot to learn from them. I explained in my original post, and there’s also a podcast episode on this titled Weird Animal Girl, as a child, I own that wholly and fully now, and I’m wearing it as my badge of honor, in fact. Thanks to my friend Cheryl Olmsted for creating the awesome badge of honor graphics for me and recognizing the WAG acronym.
I said this back in February of 2016: “so the other day as I was getting ready to go outside in my bathing suit to sunbathe in this insane geo-engineered warm weather we are having in the middle of February, I went into weird animal girl mode. My dogs were watching me get ready, and as I just started talking to them, I showed King how it was now for him as we rehab his knee. He had had a CCL tear. And how he has to walk for now, not zoom. I’d do a short, slow walk, and then I told him how he was going to get faster.
And I’d walk a little faster in place. And then I showed him how Schatzie and I are running, and how he’d be doing it before too long also. And keep in mind, they’re watching me while I’m doing all this scenario. I started running in place too, and I was going on and on, walk, go, faster, zoom. They got so excited, as only dogs can, started the barking and howling game. King still does it to this day. And I had to join in with them. Yes, I can tell you, we had an awesome time. We all released some pent-up energy, and we were able to relax together in the sun together shortly after this little wag breakout. And it got me to thinking about how much we don’t deserve their faithfulness and loyalty to us, but I am so glad they willingly give it.
For me, they model our Lord. To honor their worthiness, my friend Alexandra Mikic released her updated, back then, edited Kindle version of her book, and it’s also in print now, How to Immunize Your Dog Without Vaccines. And it includes the story of three of my dogs, Fridge, my Golden Retriever, Shadrach, my Neomastiff, and Meshach, my Great Dane, my Striped Great Dane, as well as the stories of multiple of my friends’ dog stories.”
I just wanted you guys to know about that, and that’s why I was writing this whole thing. The whole point of this particular blog post was to point to the book, but also to share that we can really interact with our animals at their level.
They teach us so, so, so, so much. And a lot has to do with our words. So how does this all relate to the redemption (aka the title of the show), From Neglect to Redemption? Well, redemption comes in us, because our animals are simply responding to us, no matter what.
Leben loved me regardless. The reason why he had so many owners, and as you recall from last week’s episode, when I was driving off in the car and looked out the rear-view mirror, I was with the two breeders, and he was with his new owners. I’m talking about a couple of guys that were very wealthy, in a very wealthy home that he was going to live in, and they almost couldn’t hold on to him. He was doing everything he could to run after the car. And all I could think in my mind at that time was, what kind of problems were they going to have? And I found out that he was sold, as I stated before, subsequently four more times, I think it was. And the breeder kept in touch with every single person who had him. He ended back up in a nice home, she said, in the mountains, which he loved, and where he and I had the best time when we lived up there briefly. All I can say is that, from what I learned from him, and every single one since, has mattered in growing me and bringing me to this redemptive state. And the Lord, knowing me, because He made me the way he did, has just used animals to teach me always.
They step into their roles. And they – if you’ve watched any of the videos on YouTube of how these poor animals were treated, neglected, abused, starved and all these things, they’re hard to watch – how they come through it, to me, is like watching the transformation of the caterpillar to the butterfly. It’s real messy in the middle for the caterpillar. It’s difficult for the caterpillar. But they’re compelled to do it, so they can soar.
My hope here, with this podcast, whether I’m sharing personal stories or other stories or allegories or whatever they might be, that we would know that we can all take that journey and decide to take that journey. And remember what the quote is on front of the podcast page, the website: “Truth exists. Only lies are invented.”
Truth didn’t have to be invented. It just is. Truth is a Person, which you know, if you’ve listened to the end of each episode of this podcast, you know Who I’m talking about. And I’m going to share another article with you so we can learn how to speak what we want, not what we don’t want. I hear too many people speaking what they don’t want. I’m even doing that. And it’s a very interesting article by Kim Potter of a New Thing Ministries titled, “Stop Circling and Enter In“.
And wow, was it really powerful. I mean, really. It’s not a long article, so you can get into it, read it, and it brings some of the same kind of feel into what we just talked about today. We can decide if we’re going to go through and hold ourselves constantly in regret over decisions and things we’ve done or learn from them and share and apply those to our current situations with our current animals that are in our lives today, or we can stay stuck in that past.
I don’t want to. A whole lot’s been going on in my life personally. I can choose to kick against the goads and just resist it. Or I can choose to grow from it so that eventually the butterfly emerges and I can soar. That’s my hope for us, for all of us, so that we see a whole lot less of the animals going through these horrible things.
In fact, I’m going to say we had a veterinarian on our previous podcast years and years ago. She is a veterinary neurosurgeon, Dr. Susan Wagner, and she co-authored the book with Joshua Leed, Through a Dog’s Ear. She was a great guest who came on a couple of times. The second time she came on, she talked about how, and I’ve never forgotten this, it’s really not the animals who need rescue, it’s us. And when we are, then they are. So, when we are redeemed, so will they be. There won’t be abuse and neglect when a person is redeemed. That’s how this became a Dane-sized transformative tale about the spotted and speckled ones. I think you can figure out from what happened with Jacob and Laban that as he grew in his abilities to lead and do the right thing, he was blessed more and more and more. Plus, it was strategic, and it was planned so that he grew.
You might want to read that whole chapter. And from there, a lot was able to transpire. I felt like the Lord was talking to me about that, that I’m moving in that direction. As well as for the restoration of all that the locust has eaten and stolen (reference Joel 2:25 in scripture), everything that’s been stolen, eventually will be redeemed alongside of us. What’s more important is that we ARE whole and well in our spirits, souls, and bodies – exactly what Jesus said that in Him we ARE healed.
Tim Hansel said, “Pain is inevitable, but misery is optional. We cannot avoid pain, but we can avoid joy.”
Go back to the episode with Shadrach, my Neo-Mastiff, sharing about how Healing Comes from Joy (blog post and podcast episode on that link). The Lord’s joy is my strength. Go back to that one and listen to it. I had several people reach out to me and tell me how much they enjoyed that one. And then again, this one, the first part of this episode. I hope this blessed you, and that if nothing else, you take away from it to forgive yourself of any mistakes, and others as well. And watch what happens in the meantime with the animals, because they will come through.
Before I end this one, I watched a video recently of a Bengal cat who had been passed to various owners, then was adopted by a woman. She might have been his fourth or fifth owner, something like that. This cat was very aggressive. They’re big house cats, not little ones. She had scars to prove it. I’ve had similar things go on with me, with this little feral guy I have now Ezra, when he was young. Anyway, this woman learned how to interact with this cat. And what she did was, she gave him back his confidence, she gave him stability, with her love and her patience with him, he became the cat he was meant to be, what the other owners either couldn’t figure out or didn’t want to. These animals are worthy of the truth.
So are we. We’re worthy in Christ, in Him. He’s Who makes us worthy. So that’s all I have for this time, you guys. Be blessed.
Until next time…
Have a PAWSitively, tail waggin’, REDEEMED day!
Kim Bloomer, V.N.D., N.D. is an animal naturopath as well as being certified in small animal nutrition, with years of experience in animal wellness. Dr. Kim is a published author, writer, blogger, host of the DOGgone Truth podcast. Dr. Kim offers Animal Naturopathy Mentoring and Courses. Subscribe to her DOGgone Newsletter for updates or to her blog via email. Copyright ©2005-2024 Aspenbloom Pet Care, Dr. Kim Bloomer, All rights reserved. No part of this article may be reproduced in any form without the written consent of the Author/Publisher. This article is intended to be educational. However, it is not intended to be a substitute for diagnosis or treatment from a qualified animal health professional. Dr. Kim Bloomer and Aspenbloom Pet Care, do not assume any legal responsibility for misuse of the products discussed in this article. The only essential oils referenced on this website are Young Living.
