Well, you see them everywhere now in strollers, in tiny sweaters, on just about every commercial jet flight now that I'm on for babies.

And it turns out how we treat those pets says more about our own hearts than it does about the pets themselves.

There's a deeper question here, Pastor John, about what happens to us when a pet starts to fill a hole that only a person could fill and should fill?

So we are talking child pets.

And when I saw this question come in a few weeks back, I knew I had to ask it.

And I've been looking forward to this day ever since. Yeah, well, we'll see. It's going to be fun.

At the very least, it'll be fun, maybe even edifying. Today, I'm asked Pastor John,

fur babies and pet stewardship. The question is from Samuel in New Haven, Connecticut.

Pastor John, hello, and thank you for entertaining my question.

It's a cultural one.

You seem like a man who loves dogs.

I do too, which is why I love the end of APJ 1001.

Do pets distract Christian life?

There you mentioned your golden doodle dusty and all that she taught you over the

years. And in April 2014, in an article, you mentioned in passing a dog in your childhood in

South Carolina. So what do you think of this society in which we live, increasingly treating

dogs and other pets as children as child replacements by single women who have a nurturing instinct or especially by married couples who could have children, but choose instead to spend their discretionary money on pampering those pets with unnecessary clothes and expensive food, flying them on jets,

using resources that would easily support a child and throwing it to the dogs, as Jesus put it

in Matthew 1526.

I'm sure you've seen this.

How does it strike you?

When I saw this question, I thought to myself, you know, when I'm dead and gone, somebody's going to say,

...