We have a cat that adopted us. I imagine that someone threw him out along the highway that is just in front of our temporary home here in SC. My husband named him “Ralph”. Personally I don’t like the name but could not think of an alternative so he is officially Ralph. I inherited a love for cats from my mother. I can’t remember a time when we didn’t have at least one cat when I was growing up. All of them just showed up at our house and we adopted them.
Both my husband and I had been talking about getting a dog when we were settled in our permanent home. Ralph had been coming around to eat for several weeks when we decided to let him come in the trailer to eat and spend some time with us. I was hoping that we could move him to our new home. I bought him a small bed and put a flea collar on him. I brought his food dishes inside to protect them from other wild cats. My goal was to tame him and give him a safe, secure home where he would be loved and protected from the elements and wild animals. But, he had other ideas.
The last few days he has shown up faithfully morning, noon and night to eat and sleep in “his” rocking chair. But other times we will not see Ralph for several days. He always comes back thinner and seems happy to be indoors once more. Unfortunately, this behavior has proved to us that we cannot move him to town. He is too old to be retrained as a house cat. This past week, after disappearing for several days, Ralph showed up. His eye was matted shut with blood, half of his tail had been torn off. It looked like he was the loser in a major battle. Now he is very interested in staying close to home and showing up for all meals.
This scenario reminds me of humans. We are so often sure that we can handle our life just fine without God’s help so we go our own way blithely assuming that we know more than our creator about how to run our lives. For a while this scenario works until our life hits a snag. We lose a job, someone we love dies, our dreams are destroyed. We may still muddle along trying to fix things on our own until we finally realize that we could ask our Heavenly Father for help. Unfortunately, while trying to run our own lives we completely miss the multitude of blessings that God is waiting to pour on us. Often we end up just like Ralph, covered with scars from the battles of life.
Ralph could have saved himself a lot of pain if he had stayed close to home and allowed us to feed and care for him. How much pain could we avoid if we would learn to walk daily with our Heavenly Father trusting Him to guide and care for us? Wouldn’t it make sense that God, who created us and knows everything about our lives, would only want the best for us?
I will always take Ralph back in and feed him and love him. But, I cannot make his eye to see again or regrow his tail. God is always waiting for us to come to Him. He will forgive us and love us. But the scars that we created from our sin will not go away. We need to learn to wait on the Lord’s perfect timing and trust Him that He knows what is best for us even when that big world looks like so much fun. After all, shouldn’t we have more intelligence and sense than a simple house cat?
Ministering Designer 