seven times seventy: a collie named Max

The following is a beautiful reminiscence of dog fostering by Cindy Crosby, originally featured on Today's Christian Woman's Kyria blog and scheduled to be published next summer in a collection by Revell tentatively titled Great Dog Stories:

I’m a good hater and a slow forgiver.  It took a dog to show me I was wrong.

He was a tri-color, collie-shepherd mix whose whole world was a cardboard refrigerator box with a short kennel run, tucked behind a seedy motel.  A Rottweiler shared the same space.  As the bitter months of winter bore down on Illinois, the two huddled together for warmth.  But a cardboard box isn’t much protection against the cold.

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it takes a village ...

Karen Swallow Prior of Liberty University originally posted this hopeful note on Facebook, "It Takes a Village ... to Care for Creation":

I was sitting at my desk one recent afternoon when I received a panicky email from one of my former students, Bryan Rhodes:

I’m e-mailing this to you because I’m not sure who else to talk to about it.  Today, I was sitting in my home working on my thesis and at about 3:00 (about 10 minutes ago) I heard a horrible screeching sound, that sounded either like an animal or a child.  So I stepped outside (I was only in pajamas—it’s a thesis day) and I heard the sound coming from the house across the street.  It was getting worse and then I heard a woman yell “I will call the police on you.”

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