I have always struggled a bit with the idea of God, although I have always been drawn to the idea of spirituality. One seems to often go hand in hand with the other.

A few years ago, I was doing a book reading – This was for Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die –  in Milwaukee. Beverly,  lawyer, a grounded and accomplished woman who had just lost her dog, introduced  herself to me after the talk and told me about her beloved Lab, Sandy, who had just died.

We talked for awhile and have had an online dialogue about grief and animals ever since. Years later, she is still grieving for Sandy, still missing her, still angry and torn up about her death. She tells me Sandy comes and speaks to her, sends her messages, “I just can’t really move on.”

Beverly is a deeply religious person, she attends Episcopal services faithfully. She believes in God, she prays to him, and believes he is the guiding spirit in her life.

So why, I asked her recently, can’t she accept God’s decision to end her dog’s life and bring her another one?

Why  does she accept God’s shaping of her life and the world beyond, but not a world in which the dogs we love die?

I have always understood that human beings need to believe in a God. It provides them comfort and community and helps them to deal with inevitably of death. It helps people to understand a complex and sometimes disturbing world.

I am having a similar and mostly internal dialogue with  a good friend who is mourning the death of someone she loved very much.

She can’t accept that he is gone, she is angry about his loss and can’t accept his absence in many ways. It makes no sense to her, and has left her empty and lost.

Like Beverly, she believes her soulmate is sending her messages, giving her guidance, standing by her side giving her direction. She is not able or willing to move forward with her own life, she sees him as a constant presence in her own.

Like Beverly, she believes strongly in God as a central figure in her life, she prays to him and invokes him, she is the Creator, he is responsible for life and for death.

It is not for me to judge or criticize either of these people, they are good people struggling with different kinds of grief in their own way. Nobody can tell anyone else how to grieve.

But I am increasingly struck by this question, since they are both believers: “What is God for, exactly?”

So many people in our world, many of them powerful leaders, constantly invoke God, but seem unable or willing to accept the very things God is supposed to be doing – creating human beings who live and die, guiding us to love one another.

Every God in every major faith speaks of empathy and compassion and charity, but very few of the people who speak of God practice those things or seem to value them.

What is God doing for them?

I do not worship this kind of God in my own life, yet I have always accepted that the dogs and I love and the people I love will all die, and that I will follow them in a flash.

That is as enduring and powerful a life force as birth itself, it is one of the very few things that every single being on the earth, animal or human, will do. It is the thing that most powerfully binds us and preoccupies us.

If I believed in the kind of God Beverly and my friend worship, I wonder if I could accept the death of a dog, or of a partner as a part of God’s work? If we worship the Christian or Judaic or Muslim God that most of the humans on the earth worship, there is always the idea of God’s will.

Faith is to a great degree, the acceptance of that. Countless sermons preach the acceptance of God’s will. Yet something in so many of us can’t or won’t.

The death of a dog is not the same as the death of a human to me, yet it raises  many of the same questions when it comes to grief, faith and acceptance. Beverly is a successful and intelligent person of faith. She knows how the world works. Why can’t she accept what her God has chosen to do with her dog?

What does God mean to her, really?

In his book “Discernment,” the spiritual author Henri Nouwen writes “Finding ourselves in a relationship with God is prerequisite to the discernment of God’s will and direction.”

The purpose of discernment, he writes, “is to know God’s will, that is, to find, accept and affirm the  unique way in which God’s love is manifest in our life.”

If one believes in God, must it not follow that the death of a dog or a human is God’s will? Something to be accepted.

As in any relationship, Nouwen writes, there will be painful feelings as well as joyous ones, rejection as well as attraction, resentment as well as gratitude and love.

And although Nouwen didn’t mention it, life as well as death.

In the past year, I lost a dog I loved as well as two human beings I loved. I do not worship the same God Beverly and my friend worship, I’m not as clear about my relationship with the feelings and beliefs so many of us call “God” as they are.

I do believe there are greater powers than me that direct our universe, and I do seek discernment, the search for a moral and spiritual life. When death came into my life – I began losing people and dogs close to me a few years ago – I learned to celebrate their lives and be grateful for my time with them.

I do not believe it is any deity’s will that I spent my life in mourning or regret.

And I have learned to let go.

It was not easy or painless, it was not simple, it does not make me superior to anyone else.

But as I struggle to come to terms with my own spirituality – I have always felt closest to the true spirit of Jesus Christ, if not his deity – I ask myself what is God for,  really,  if I can’t accept the death of a dog or the loss of a beloved friend?

Or my mother and father.

I told Beverly I could not really help her deal with the death of her dog any longer, that is between  her and her God. I have to move on, too many dogs and people to  grieve.

I hope she can move on also, it is not in my power to help her. Nor can I help my friend accept the death of her partner, she is not seeking that from me. And that’ s not for me to do.

If there is a God, that is his work.

I hope the God she worships will reveal his will. I hope her God is not hollow, but real.

I can only try to understand the idea and  reach of the idea of “God” myself. I see God in nature, in the flowers, in the leaves of trees, in color and light,  in my animals, in the love and compassion humans can feel for one another.  In the big hearts and generous souls of people.

I believe some kind of God brought me love, there is no other way it could have happened for me. I am close, I am  not there.

I like Nouwen’s idea of our relationship with God as something of a lover’s dilemma, a struggle to give and receive, to trust and obey the call.

I hope to find my own idea of God one day, and if and when I do, I hope to fully embrace and accept two of his greatest creations:  life, and it’s birth twin, death.

For me, there is no other way to get to my idea of God.