To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here
Mary Sue and I share life with 10 cats.
I almost wrote “own,” but as all pet fanciers discover, the cat-human connection is more like a partnership than ownership.
We never planned on reaching feline double-digits. But when we moved 18 months ago to the farm we currently call home, we inherited some barn kitties who were more than willing to associate themselves with people who have a habit of opening cans of Fancy Feast.
Five of our cats live in our house, while the other five use our outdoor buildings as their base of operations. Most of them are named after vegetables, and all of them, as best we can tell, had a rough start to life.
The barn cats – Sugar Beet, Gus (Asparagus is his full name), Rudy (from Rutabaga), Tom (from Tomato), and Butter (short for Butternut Squash) – have pretty much ensured that our property is a mouse-free zone. Gus, Rudy, and Beet were originally a homeless family scratching out an existence in a nearby town.
Spring (from Spring Pea), Zeke (Zuccini), and Tippy Toes Tomatillo (don’t ask) are a mother-and-two-sons family whom we found last year in a corner of our barn. These days they get to crash on our bed and our couch.
Our other two indoor felines are Tater and Rebel. Tater appears in the picture above, peeking out from under a blanket. She was a neglected kitten not many days from death whom we retrieved from a farm up the road.
Rebel, who is going through life without a vegetable name, was a “street kitty” found by our son and daughter-in-law near a tattoo parlor in Georgia. Today she’s as fat and happy as Garfield.
Cats tend to divide humanity into two groups.
There are those who love them and those who wonder whose bright idea it was to invite such self-absorbed, preening divas into the sanctity of our homes.
You’ve heard about the difference between cats and dogs, right? Dogs look at their human companions and say, “You love me, you feed me, and you meet all of my needs. You must be God!” Cats look at their human partners and say, “You love me, you feed me, and you meet all of my needs. I must be God!”
The McDonalds clearly fall into the cat-lovers camp. We find them to be fascinating creatures and quite undeserving of the critique that they are universally indifferent, standoffish, and unloving.
It’s just that a handful of cats turn out to be exceedingly affection-challenged.
Which brings us to Shenanigans.
Of all the cats with whom we have shared life, Shenanigans was the most exasperating. She was beautiful – a magnificent purebred North American tabby that we inherited from a family battling allergy issues. But her personality was prickly, to say the least. She acted as if our touches were personal violations. “Wow, she’s really grumpy,” said our vet on one occasion.
She routinely hocked up hairballs just after we cleaned our carpets, and always managed to catnap, and thus shed, on a stack of clean laundry.
She was the least “value added” pet we have ever had. To top it all off, she lived for 16 years (which came to feel like every one of her 112 cat-years).
Friends and family members thought we were crazy. “You have to get rid of that cat. Why do you put up with her?”
We asked ourselves that question many times. The answer, I think, is that we had made a commitment to Shenanigans. She had become family. And we didn’t find it easy to part with her just because she was so happiness-challenged.
For that reason, Shenanigans and all of the cats we have known have taught us a great deal about grace.
Grace is the lavish, unconditional, and absolutely unmerited kindness of God.
No one can earn or deserve grace. It is given simply because we exist. It is poured out in spite of less-than-stellar personality, character, and performance.
We chose to extend grace to Shenanigans because, quite frankly, the only hope for our own present and future is that others will extend grace to us.
I, too, can be grumpy. People who love me can find me exasperating. And while I don’t expect one day to hock up hairballs on the carpet, grace is the assurance that I won’t become dispensable if I do.
If we think it’s hard to herd cats, think how hard it must be for God to manage us.
No wonder people sing that his grace is amazing.