With the NCAA basketball tournament just around the corner, this newspaper is sponsoring an inventive promotion called Mutt Madness.

Mutt Madness, March Madness. A nice play on words.

Ergo, basketball and dogs are on my mind lately.

The Missouri presidential primary is this Tuesday.

Missouri's only occupant of the White House to-date, Harry Truman, famously said, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog."

It is also to President Truman that these words are attributed: "Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads."

Sounds like a dog lover to me.

After having recently attended the Power of Pawstivity event for the Humane Society of Southeast Missouri, the local charity revealed a statistic to patrons of the well-attended affair.

Over 90% of dogs in its care are saved while two-thirds of cats were spared being euthanized in 2018.

They'd like to save them all but with 3,000 new animals every year, the current facility won't yet support the goal of a no-kill shelter.

Maybe someday soon the objective will be realized.

My wife Lois and I are on board. We support no-kill with our thoughts and with our finances. We've had domestic animals for our entire marriage. We've always had cats. More recently we've had a dog. Our current canine, a black-mouthed cur named Sammy, is a good-hearted animal.

Sammy was trained by a prison inmate, part of the "Puppies for Parole" program of the Missouri Department of Corrections.

The MDC reveals on its website that over 5,000 dogs trained by offenders have been adopted.

I don't know who the incarcerated man is who trained our Sammy, but I'd like to track him down and thank him -- because he's doing God's work.

If you love a dog enough to train him to be fit company for adoption into a residence, you deserve some gratitude.

Interestingly, cats go unmentioned in the 66 books comprising the Old and New Testaments, but dogs are the focus of numerous Bible verses.

One of the great spies in the Scriptures had a first name derived from the term used for a canine. Caleb comes from the Hebrew "celeb," meaning dog, according to Ellen White, Ph.D., former senior editor with the Biblical Archaeology Society.

When Caleb and fellow spy Joshua told the Israelites that their reconnaissance into Canaan revealed the inhabitants could be defeated, the pair's ideas were met with resistance.

The duo pressed its case for invasion "doggedly," forgive the pun, and Moses was persuaded.

In the life of Jesus, we read of a Canaanite woman who appeals to Christ on behalf of her "demon-possessed" daughter. (Matthew 15:21-28).

Matthew shows a Jesus with a bias toward Gentiles because the writer has Jesus dismissing the woman with these words: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." (v. 25)

The Master follows up the remark by referencing humanity's best friends.

"It is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs." (v. 26)

In one of the boldest challenges you'll find anywhere in the canonical Scriptures to something Jesus said, the woman replied, "Yes, it is, Lord. Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." (v. 27)

Hearing this, Jesus reverses his previous dismissal, lauds the woman for her faith and healed her daughter instantly. (v. 28)

There are other ways to interpret the narrative but with my boy Sammy in mind, the author of this column, a retired pastor and an instructor in New Testament at Southeast Missouri State, chooses to construe this vivid tale in the following way.

Even Jesus couldn't resist a dog.

So endeth the sermon.