Tuesday, May 12, 2020

Bright as the Sun, Ever Love Glows

this week i want to write about cats and about one cat in particular.  my wife and i are great lovers of cats.  we like dogs, too.  at various times in our lives we have had dogs as part of our household, but dogs have not been a permanent part of our home while cats have.  as a child, my mother would never allow me to have a cat for a pet.  for some reason she had a dislike of cats and always preferred that we have a dog.  my wife, on the other hand, grew up with cats around.  i had always promised myself that i would have a cat when i became independent of my parents and had my own home, so when we moved into our first home after we married, my wife and i soon adopted a cat.  we've always had at least one cat ever since then, except for a period of about and year and a half when we lived in an apartment while i was going to graduate school.

right now we have three cats.  they moved with us when we left our home in the southern part of the state to move to our present home almost three years ago.  one is an older cat that we inherited from our son when we moved away and couldn't have a pet in the apartment he moved into.  another is a cat who adopted us when she was just transitioning from the kitten stage into an adult cat.  we discovered her living underneath our guest house in the back yard and were finally successful in luring out and up to our house with food, a process that took several weeks of gradually moving her food bowl closer and closer to our house.

the third cat, we adopted when he was a kitten.  some friends down the street, who are also cat lovers, had found him living in a flower bed in the park across from our home.  these neighbors had taken him to their house but were unable to get him to stay.  he kept returning to his flower-bed home in the park.  they suggested that we might have more success in moving him to our home.  he was a beautiful kitten but very wary of people.  we were able to capture him by bringing him food.  it took two attempts to get him to stay with us but we were ultimately able to persuade him to make his home with us.

because of his coloration, we named him "greyson."  he remained fearful of people but loved eating more than he feared us.  he never wanted us to pick him up or to pet him and remained aloof from us and the other cats, only joining them at meal times.  once, after he became a young adult, he disappeared for several days.  we were sure he was gone for good, but he reappeared at the cat's feeding spot one day with severe neck injuries.  he had to spend a couple of days in the "cat hospital" but survived his wounds, resuming his old pattern of independence when he came back to us, though he never again strayed from our back yard.

when we moved, we were afraid that we'd never get him to adapt to his new home.  we kept him and the other cats inside our garage for a couple of weeks before letting them out to explore their new territory.  shortly after we moved here, during the period of time when the cats were staying in the garage full time, he re-injured his neck somehow.  while he recovered, we kept him in our bedroom and adjoining bath.  we were amazed when he began to climb in bed with us at night and thank us by rubbing his forehead against our foreheads.  he'd never gotten close to us before, but it seemed that he was aware that we were doing our best to nurse him through his injuries and that he was grateful.  once his recovery was complete, he was ready to return to the garage with the other cats and became his old distant self.

on a couple of occasions, greyson vanished for short periods of time, but he always returned home.  he finally seemed to decide that his new yard and our garage was the best place to be and began to stay home all the time.  as he's become more accustomed to this new place and the patterns of life here, he's turned into a more personable cat.  he's no longer afraid of us.  we noticed the change when he began to rub against our legs when we'd go out with him on our back deck, the locale where he spends most days unless the weather is bad.  in the last several weeks, he's begun to jump up on one of the tables on the deck and insist that we pet him, something he'd never tolerate before.

we've been pleasantly surprised by the way he's evolved from a fearful cat to a more loving one.  we can only speculate about his life before he adopted us, but we've guessed that someone mistreated him as a kitten, making him afraid of people and reluctant to trust them.  we've worked hard to gain his trust and believe we've finally succeeded.  as i think about his transformation, i wonder about how much of the lesson of winning greyson over to us must apply to human beings as well.  surely, showing consistent, unconditional love towards another person must finally have an effect on even the most hardened among us.  perhaps that was what jesus was telling us when we said that we should turn the other cheek and go the extra mile.

may we learn to love unreasonably and without qualification.  may we have faith in the transforming power of love.  may we never give up on another human, despite the ill treatment we may receive from them.  may our hearts be so filled with love that there is no room for hate.  shalom.

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