What I learned from Lucy...

I got a cat about three weeks ago. A friend needed to find a new home and my husband and I said yes right away-no test run, no pictures, nothing. We had blind faith that this would be a huge boost to our quality of life. I couldn’t hardly wait to get her, and hold her, pet her and hear her cute little purring sounds. I even went to Petco and stocked up on toys and catnip to spray on everything so she'd want to be around us. But much to my dismay, when Lucy arrived, she didn’t really want anything to do with us. In fact, she ran every time we made a move toward her. Everything we tried was a miserable failure to get her to like us.

I was sure that she would snap out of it and change her mind over the next few days. But for the next week, not much changed….you could tell she was afraid that we would take her to yet another home and she didn't trust us not to hurt her. Until one day, I was making a tuna sandwich when she ran in the kitchen right up to me. I thought I’d finally won her over, only to find that she had a keen sense of smell and wanted my tuna. I decided I wasn’t above bribing her to win her love and gave her a small piece of tuna. She devoured it and I had found my key to her heart. She warmed up to me a little after that, but didn’t transform our cool co-existence in my small apartment. The only time she would come near me was when she was trying to get tuna. She had figured out it came from the kitchen, so each time she noticed me going that way, followed me in attempt to coax more tuna out of me. I found myself somewhat frustratedly saying to her (in silly cat voices, of course) “You only come around me when you want something! All I want to do is love you! Don't you know that??”

And then it hit me. I finally realized that God has to have some similar feelings toward us. We don’t really care to have anything to do with him until we need something, and then even when all our needs are met, we aren’t content because we don’t like the dry regular cat food, and we want the tuna. Not nutritionally sound, but tastes better to us. So we come to God, rubbing up against His ankles, putting on our best behavior so that we can get what we want. For the first time I thought of it with a new perspective. I guess since I'm not a parent, I'm not faced with this on a daily basis they way most moms and dads are.

I realized that just like my cat, sometimes it's easy to be afraid that God may do something that we don't like, or that will be painful or uncomfortable for us. But this this thought is such a painful exposure that we don't really know his character. We may "know" in our heads what God is like, but if it has truly translated into our hearts and permeated every fiber of our being, it changes the way we think about life, God, our future, the way we trust and how we live. I keep reminding myself that we have to make it our life-long, everyday goal to REALLY, truly and thoroughly get know God. I think we so easily forget that he has our best interest in mind - or maybe deep down don't really believe that His plan is better than ours...I am learning if I can believe that His ways are so much better than mine - even when he gives me what we don't want, and withholds what I do want - my life will not only be simpler, but better, and more worry-free.

But I'm also learning that the decision to trust God's ways is one that I alone can make. Unlike my petty need for my cat to love me, God doesn’t try to buy our love or bribe us. He isn’t insecure, and he doesn’t need our love or approval to keep on being the perfect God that He is. He just keeps loving us, waiting for us, and hoping that we will realize just how much He only wants to hold us, love us and get to know us. But he will wait, and the responsibility remains in our hands to embrace that love and experience the awesome closeness of a loving God.

(Who would have imagined a cat could be so thought provoking??)