The Lesson of the Lost Cat
Several years ago, I had time to be with my grandson, Rowan, who was visiting from England. He was eleven at the time and came over by himself. We went to Disney, the Magic Kingdom, and then Universal Studios. We went on all the rides, Space Mountain, Back to the Future, Terminator 2, Alien Encounter, Jaws, Twist, and all those kind of things. Then we spent a day at home to recover, and planned to go to Adventure Island in Tampa on the Friday.
Kathryn and I had a cat we had adopted after a friend of ours who owned her died a couple of months previous. Tanya was a calico, about three years old, and skittish; she hid under the bed at the slightest provocation and with our grandson being there she spent a lot of time under the bed.
On the Thursday we hadn’t seen much of her, but I knew she’d been out from under the bed because the food had been eaten. Then when we got up Friday morning, the food hadn’t been eaten and I wondered where she was. I asked Kathryn if she’d seen Tanya last night and she said she hadn’t. So I thought well maybe she’s still under the bed; I looked under the bed and she wasn’t there. We looked everywhere in the house, in all the closets and everywhere around – no cat! She was gone; she was out of the house somewhere.
She must have sneaked sometime on Thursday, so she’d been out all night. So what did we do? We started to worry, right? We hoped she hadn’t gone too far; we hoped we could get her back, we hoped she hadn’t been hit by a car, all those kind of things. And we all had places to go, Rowan and I to Adventure Island and Kathryn had some appointments. So Rowan and I looked all around the neighborhood, we went on the roof and looked all around the roof; there was no sign of her. All around the house, nothing there, and to different gardens down the road, but nothing. She was nowhere in sight.
We called the SPCA, Friends of Strays, and the animal shelter; we put a “lost calico cat” sign on a tree, and then went on our separate ways. The animal shelter people said we should come there between 4:30 and 5 pm to check on the “found” book, so we thought we’d call there on the way home from Tampa. But we got stuck in traffic in Tampa and realized they would be closed by the time we got there, so we went straight home.
As soon as we got home, I asked Kathryn, “Is Tanya here?” She said, “Well, I have a story to tell you.” She said she got home about three o’clock and she felt moved to go out in the back yard and sit there in a chair and pray. She said, “I felt that I really needed to get deeply still and pray. I prayed out loud, ‘in the name of Jesus Christ.’”
When you pray “in the name of Jesus Christ” you are praying in the nature of Jesus Christ, and you are praying in the nature of God within you. When you pray in that consciousness you are accessing all of the wisdom and power of the living God.
So Kathryn said she got really, really still, and then she opened her eyes and made a move to go into the back yard next door. She looked back at our roof, and there was the cat!
There was a small deck on the roof of the house we lived in at that time. So Kathryn went up the spiral staircase which led to the deck. Tanya was way over on the roof, and so Kathryn sat down with her back to the cat and just murmured her name, “Good girl, Tanya.” Finally the cat came up to her and started nudging her and loving her. Tanya was a big heavy cat and Kathryn couldn’t get hold of her and she still had to get back down the steps. So she went down and got some food and water and brought it back up for her.
We came home around 5:30 pm and Tanya had come down from the roof and gone into hiding again. Finally she scooted around and came in the back door which we had left open.
The important lesson here is that we found her because Kathryn prayed; she took time to be still and to pray instead of hurrying around doing the busy work. When she did, she looked up and there was the cat.
How often we tend to do things the hard way, instead of the easy way! It’s prayer that brings about right action and positive results. When you bring things together in prayer then good things begin to happen for you.
Remember, God is Blessing You, Right Now!
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Rev. Alan A. Rowbotham, a Unity minister for over forty years, invites you to subscribe to his free inspirational newsletter, Spiritual Solutions.
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