TGIF
Our church sends out an email every week of the prayer requests that were made after the service.
It’s divided into two parts…current requests and the permanent prayer requests.
The permanent ones are the ones that never seem to get answered so we just copy and paste them every week.
I’ve almost stopped looking at them because they taunt me and mock my faith.
I think I’ve had the same two requests up for four years or so…
I pray about them now and again, but I’ve ceased to expect much.
This, of course, brings me to a cat story.
Every day when I leave the house, I lock Chester in the house.
He can’t go outside because he’s a risk (to say the least) to other cats, small dogs, and obnoxious humans.
As I turn the key from the outside, he takes his position inside…right in front of the door.
He calls for me until I come home.
I was just gone for three days…
My mom would come in and feed him, then he would take his place again.
His place was in front of the door calling for His Dad until his Dad comes home.
When I came home I could hear him calling as I walked up the driveway…the howling growing louder and more frequent as I got closer to the door.
I barely sat down before a 30 pound sack of cat landed in my lap.
He wasn’t angry that I was gone so long, he was just overjoyed that I was home.
He never stopped calling for me.
He never had any doubt I would show up.
He probably thinks I finally heard him…
Three days is probably like four years in cat time…
Lord, make me like Chester…faithful in asking and joyful in your presence.
Make your own application…
I just had a friend who had spent years and years and many prayers and doctors visits trying to get pregnant, who finally figured it would never happen, announce her pregnancy. I don’t know why sometimes the good thing you long for happens and sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m really grateful when it does.
My application is a little quirky… ?
I am quite certain that there have been times that God has locked me in and let me howl… For the good of all
Awww. What a great, tho quirky, cat Chester is. Huge, too. Holy moly… lottacat.
I’m with John 20:29…. I think God has let me ‘howl’ a bit too… knowing full well that His plan for me wasn’t what I was howling for.
This is a good one Micheal, thank you.
I’m sure you still have a copy of The Ragamuffin Gospel around. Please take a few minutes and read the chapter “The Second Calling”. I read it for the 30th time or so this morning, but it really spoke to me in a new way. There may be something there for you as well.
Don’t know if this would mean anything, but Stanley Hauerwas writes about or lack of patience for disability in the book Living Gently In A Violent World: “We see [ speed undercutting viability of community] in medicine today; the task is not to care for patients but to cure them. When caring turns into curing, we don’t know what to do with patients when we can’t cure them. What do we do with people who have diseases it seems they won’t recover from? That’s speed taking over.”
I pray you would have the peace of your fat cat.