We walk our dog on Broad Street past Second Baptist Church, and along the way someone often asks, “What kind of dog is he?”

“She’s a rescue dog,” we say.  “Her name is Jazz.  She’s part Basenji, with lots of other things mixed in.  They picked her up off the streets of New Orleans after Katrina, and later we adopted her.”  We’re a little proud of Jazz’s celebrity status as a Katrina survivor.

The vets at the animal shelter who examined her concluded she was a street dog even before the hurricane.  We have given her her first permanent home.  She enjoys less freedom now than before the storm, but she doesn’t have to sleep in alleys anymore or scrounge for scraps in dumpsters.  She sleeps on a soft, dry bed, eats twice a day and soaks up lots of love.  We call her the love sponge.

I’d never heard the term ‘rescue dog’ before Jazz came into our lives.  She was rescued, saved, and her story has taught me about salvation, about being saved.

My church doesn’t talk about salvation — that’s for Baptists and Pentecostals.  The language of ‘being saved’ makes us uneasy, and our theology makes salvation unnecessary anyway.  Since God’s love embraces everyone, the danger of being lost threatens no one.  No one needs rescue.

But Jazz’s story tells me something different, and it illustrates a basic theme in the New Testament.  The lost are truly lost, wandering the streets ‘without hope and without God in the world,’ until love finds them, rescues them and brings them home.

When children in the foster care system are adopted and find a permanent placement, they call it their forever home.  My wife and I gave Jazz a forever home, and in a far larger sense, God provides us a forever home in Christ.  We’re not God’s children automatically by birth or nature, says St Paul, but by the grace of adoption.

We once were lost, but now we’re found.  Then we become love sponges.