Of cats and WalMart bags and God...

God uses the funniest (as in strange/funny) things to speak truth to me sometimes. Maybe that says something about my character...

My cat, Pissy (yes, that's really her name), has been crazy tonight. Running circles around me, jumping in my lap, meowing loudly, doing her racetrack gallop--through the house, up the chair, down the chair and back around the circle in the opposite direction. And jumping onto the bench under the window and pawing at the window blinds, which she KNOWS is absolutely forbidden and irritates me more than anything else she does--she's ruined countless sets of mini-blinds with those antics.

Tonight, she would stick a paw into the blinds and pull them down, then turn around to see if I was watching, with (I swear it) a totally defiant look on her whiskery face. As soon as I would jump up to smack her, she would leap off the table and run. She was acting like she really wanted something and I should know exactly what she wanted (and then, of course, rush to do her bidding), but the door was wide open so she could go outside to enjoy her favorite perch on the front porch and I knew her food and water bowls were full. I thought maybe we were going to have another earthquake--I keep hearing that animals act strangely right before an earthquake.

I was doing some laundry tonight and when I went to throw the laundry in the dryer, she came galloping into the laundry room right behind me, ran to her food bowl and started meowing. I looked down. No food bowl in sight. A WalMart plastic bag had fallen off the shelf above her bowl and had drifted down and completely covered the bowl. It was there. But she couldn't see it. And she apparently couldn't figure out how to move the bag (I'm surprised at that, really) to get to the food she knew was there.

I picked the bag up and she dived into the food like she was starving. I stood there, looking down at her and the now-exposed food bowl, and God started nudging me.

How often are we like Pissy? How often do we run around like maniacs, looking for someone else to perform a "quick fix" that we are more than capable of performing ourselves? How often do we go to the source of our nourishment, then stand there like a dumb animal (sorry, Pissy), waiting for someone to open the book and read to us, waiting for a preacher to tell us what God is saying, waiting for someone to feed us? I've seen Pissy do some pretty amazing things--she can push open a heavy door, she's been known to claw a big chunk of carpet and padding up off a floor while trying to dig her way under a door into a room...she's a pretty smart and determined feline. And she couldn't move an empty WalMart sack off her food bowl? What is THAT about?!

Kind of like some people I know. Resourceful, skilled, crafty even...able to fix cars or unstop plugged drains or build beautiful things. But they stop dead in their tracks at the slightest little "thing" that stands between themselves and the amazing good things that God has for them...they stop and wait for someone else to come along and pick up the trifling piece of plastic bag that's covering up the place where God is dwelling. Why do we so often think we have to be "led" by someone else to what God is shouting specifically to us? And why do we allow ourselves to starve when God has given us a brain and the ability to move, go around, dig through, or blast to bits (insert mental picture of Pissy in Rambo gear, machine-gunning the WalMart bag...) the insignificant thing keeping us from the food he's given us?