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Main Street Pet Care in Joplin, Missouri, is a state-of-the-art veterinary clinic. Vet techs at several workstations are busy taking care of their furry patients. It's the kind of place that will give topnotch care to your sick or injured pet.

But then you notice a stained-glass window on the other side of the otherwise sterile examination room. It seems a bit out of place.

"That's our chapel," says Dr. Ben Leavens, owner of the clinic.

A chapel in a veterinarian's office?

Sure enough. The fluorescent examination room lights take on a less-antiseptic glow when filtered softly through the stained-glass mural of a dog, a cat, and a dove in a field of gold. At one end of the room is a small draped table with a bronze sculpture and a Bible. On the wall is a cross with a hint of rainbow reflected across it from the stained glass.

As far as Dr. Leavens knows, this is the only veterinary chapel of its kind in the country. "When you go to a human hospital, there's a chapel, so what's so different about this?" he says with a straight but gentle face. "People struggle with all kinds of issues relating to their pets, and the chapel is a quiet place to do that."

The idea for the chapel was with him from the time he started planning the new clinic. "I knew I needed to dedicate part of this building to God. I wanted to give 10 percent of the floor space, but the architect was having trouble fitting everything we needed into the existing building. He finally told me that I was dedicating the whole building to God, so the square footage wasn't that important."

The chapel serves different needs. Kervyn Smith and his family had to make the decision to have their longtime pet, a cocker spaniel named Kourtney, put to sleep. "He had congestive heart failure and tumors that were cancerous, and he had stopped eating and drinking," Smith says. "He would have been 13 the next day, and his birthday was the same day as my daughter Alicia's 18th birthday. She and I went down to see him at the clinic, and Dr. Ben took us into the chapel and talked to us a little bit about the decision we were facing. He had brochures on the grieving process. Being in the chapel was a spiritual thing."

Dr. Leavens says many people want to hold their pets as the little creatures leave this world. "We've had as many as ten family members in the chapel," he says. He usually shares Psalms 36:6 with them, and sometimes they say a prayer together, if the family doesn't mind.

The death of a pet isn't the only time people use the chapel, Dr. Leavens says. In many cases, people will use the room to pray for their pets during surgery or some other serious procedure.

Dr. Leavens also remembers the young man who lived with the Leavens family while earning money by selling books door-to-door one summer. It had been a stressful time for the boy. "He had strayed a long way from his walk with Christ." Then one day, the boy visited the clinic and went into the chapel. "He loved animals, and he was really touched by the chapel. He rededicated his life to Christ right there."

"It has come to be important to the staff, too," Leavens says. "On the first anniversary of 9/11, they asked to have a service in the chapel."

The room reflects Dr. Leavens's deep relationship with Christ. "God has blessed what we are doing here," he says proudly. "Having the clinic is a miracle to me, a gift from God."

Copyright © 2003 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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