For her third book, Kim Meeder, 48, collaborated with Laurie Sacher, 29, one of Meeder’s employees at Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch in Tumalo.

The book’s inspiration, however, was Mia — Sacher’s dog.

Sacher rescued the estimated 12-year-old Australian shepherd three years ago along with a younger dog, Dakota, about 4.

Much like the children and horses Meeder and husband Troy sought to help when they founded the ranch in 1995, these two dogs have known misfortune.

Dakota was recently hit by a car. Use of her hind legs is limited, but she’s healing.

Sacher told her dogs’ story Tuesday, sitting on the lawn at the nine-acre ranch, playing with and petting her attentive dogs under a shady tree, the Three Sisters standing stark and snowy against a clear sky.

Whether or not dogs can appreciate such a view is a moot point, but Mia won’t be seeing it. She has diabetes-caused cataracts. A veterinarian removed her left eye after it hemorrhaged, and her right eye is mostly closed and clouded over. It, too, will have to go when the pain becomes too great, Sacher said.

After she rescued Mia and Dakota from a neglectful home, Sacher admits she immediately had qualms about Mia, who was not all she’d been looking for in a pet.

In fact, that ambivalence toward Mia became the catalyst for Sacher’s spiritual growth, which Meeder chronicles in the new book, “Blind Hope,” published by Multnomah Books. The two will give presentations at area bookstores later this week (see “If you go”).

Why did she find Mia off-putting?

“She was kind of nasty, and she has really bad breath, which if you get close enough, you’ll smell. She just wasn’t what I’d pictured for a dog,” Sacher said. “I obviously did take her. I felt like it was the right thing to do,” even if it wasn’t “for the purest motives.”

“Part of it, honestly, was just my pride, like, ‘I work for a horse rescue, and I’m going to give up on this dog? That would just be pathetic, and people are going to think poorly of me.’ ”

To signify a fresh start with the dog, Sacher picked the name Mia.

“It’s a cute name, but also it means ‘mine’ in Spanish, like it belongs to somebody now,” Sacher said.

Almost from the start, she could tell that something was wrong with Mia’s health.

After visiting a couple of veterinarians, she learned Mia had diabetes.

“Again, right away, I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ ” With insulin treatment, vet visits and exercise, Mia largely bounced back, except for her eyesight.

“She weaseled her way into my heart, and I cannot imagine my life without her right now.” Sacher said. “I’ve just learned so much from her.”

Sacher began to tell her storyteller employer, Meeder, author of “Hope Rising” and “A Bridge Called Hope,” about the bond that was forming between her and Mia. Meeder began taking notes. Her intent was to write some of these stories down for a ranch newsletter: The result is the new book “Blind Hope.”

In the book, Meeder quotes Sacher: “When I rescued my dog, she was a discarded, homely mutt. I will never forget my first thought when I saw her: She’s a wretched creature … just like me.’”

The transition of changing the dog’s name was difficult. On the third day after changing it to Mia, Sacher briefly took her dog off the leash at a barbecue.

“She did fine for a while, coming back to me and responding to me. At one point she got kind of far away, and I tried to call her back. I remember she stopped and looked at me and locked eyes with me, and I could see her debating. (She) just decided to run the other way.”

With help from kind bystanders, she got Mia back in the car.

While Sacher caught her breath, “a thought settled over me: That that’s exactly how I’ve been with God most of my life, and just knowing about him, and always looking and debating and thinking and choosing to run away, again and again and again.”

Sacher makes the analogy that man is to God as dog is to owner.

“It made me actually really sad, to feel that from the master’s perspective. This is my dog that I have saved and I’m spending all this money on, and I’m doing all these things and I love her and she’d rather run away than be with me.”

Rather than feel guilt-ridden about this perceived relationship to God, Sacher says she realized, “It was a bit of a heartbreak; I’m hurting his heart.”

It launched a process of learning to follow his voice, she said.

The analogy became stronger as Mia’s eyesight failed.

“She relies on me to be her eyes, but it only works if she listens and obeys. It doesn’t work if she doesn’t,” Sacher said with a laugh. When Mia fails to do so, “she gets bloody noses” bumping into things.

And when Sacher doesn’t obey God, “It’s bloody like a bruised heart and bruised feelings. My scars and my wounds are more internal when I run and do things my own way.”

Sacher says she grew up in a guilt-ridden branch of Christianity, but doesn’t specify which. She’s also learned from Mia, who looks about as happy as a dog can, rolling around in the grass as Sacher pets her tummy, the happiness to be had just by being. “This right here, what you’re seeing, just the sweetness of being in God’s presence.”

She’d been wrestling with some of these religious issues when she opened up to Meeder at the ranch, “because it’s obviously a Christian organization.

“Kim is such an expert at taking all of my ramblings” and putting them into words, said Sacher. “I was doing things externally and still not quite believing them in my heart yet, and not feeling right about that. I want my heart to lead my actions; I don’t want to just keep doing this external stuff. Kim knew my struggle.”

Meeder explained that Sacher came to the ranch in 2006 as one of its long-term seasonal volunteers, who do two- to six-month stints at Crystal Peak. During that season, “We just fell in love with her. She did such an incredible job that we offered her a full-time position here.”

Sacher is one of 15 paid staffers at the ranch, which, at the moment, is home to 27 rescued horses. Sacher and Meeder have become friends who ski, ride horses and run together, “elbow to elbow.” Mia often accompanies them on runs.

Meeder meets with staff “for what we loosely call mentoring sessions,” she said. “And I gotta tell you, as any conscientious mentor would, that I think the mentor’s always the one that comes away with the most, and the most blessed. … I think I’m the one who’s mentored more by her.”

Once Sacher began speaking to Meeder about her insights on her relationship with the dog, the two agreed that there was a book to be written. The two began to meet, Meeder taking notes as Sacher told her stories.

“It really is a book about choosing hope. Love and hope and freedom in our heart isn’t a feeling; it’s a choice. And so much about what this book is about is choosing that for yourself,” Meeder said.

“I think so much of what this book is about is a really beautiful journey of discovery, and how interesting how often the animals in our life seem to know us better than we know ourself, and can often be a reflection of areas in our life that we need to change.”

She also believes that animals do something intuitively that people don’t always do: forgive. “Animals forgive, and move forward. And they oftentimes, by nature, show us how to proceed there.”

One thing they don’t do, however, is brush.

“You have bad breath,” Sacher told Mia, who was licking her face. “But I love you! Sweet dog; bad breath.”

Sacher said that giving up on Mia would have been like abandoning hope. “It would have been very typical of me at that point in my life, because it would have been giving up as soon as something got difficult.”

Said Meeder, “Rest assured, there will come a time in each one of our lives where someday is today, and someone is you, and it’s time to step up. And Laurie chose to take that step for an animal in need, and open her home and her life and her heart to a dog that would not have lived much longer, and so their story began.”

In March 2009, a vet had told Sacher to start saying goodbye to Mia. With proper care, food, insulin and exercise, Mia’s prognosis has improved.

Now, the dog may live a couple of more years.

“I took her in again this March, and he was like, ‘Well, I think you need to think about getting her teeth cleaned.’ Which I still need to do.”

If you go

What: Kim Meeder and Laurie Sacher, co-authors of “Blind Hope”

Details: • Meeder will appear July 23 at Paulina Springs Books in Redmond, 422 S.W. Sixth St. (541-526-1491) • Sacher will bring Mia along July 24 at Paulina Springs Books in Sisters, 252 W. Hood Ave. (541-549-0866) • Sacher and Meeder will appear at 1 p.m. July 31 at Barnes & Noble, 2690 N.E. Highway 20, Bend (541-318-7242)

Cost: Free

Contact: www.crystalpeaksyouthranch.org