It has been a long long time since I have updated my blog and I am really sorry for those that follow this one! I have so much I could share and write about for everyday here sometimes feels like a story in itself, ready to become a book in the hands of interested readers. However, my writing today will come from a focus on an event that had happened while the summer months were still upon us. I recognize that a new month in the fall season has just begun, but was reminded of my little story while I was walking home last night when I spotted a cat walking slowly but cautiously ahead of me in my direction. I recognized the cat, a wild cat with no owner to call its own, dirty and probably not one that you would lean over and pet if you could catch up with its skittish movements. This cat did not like humans and in fact feared them. I don’t blame it at all actually in this neighborhood. The cat glanced my way and quickly moved within the nearby bushes afraid of getting any closer to me, a human. However, before it ran off I noticed that this cat and I had met during the summer. It was a beautiful warm day in June and I was on my way home from a lunch appointment when I heard the sound of a cat’s meow. It sounded horrible really, desperate and crying for help. Underneath our apartment’s staircase ran a walkway that lead to the basement rooms below where those that lived in the apartments above could store their belongings or their bicycles. As I was searching for the location of where this cat’s sound was coming from I noticed an open window of one of those basement rooms alongside the outside of our apartment building. I looked in this window and sure enough there was a crying cat, with dirty white fur, pacing inside of an empty basement. The cat saw me and of course cried louder. She was trapped inside, but was not alone. Another cat was also in there but not as vocal, hiding behind a broom when I poked my head in the window. I ran to the door of this basement room and found it was locked. Then I ran to the guards of our neighborhood and explained to them that there were two cats locked in a room. Realizing how ridiculous I must have sounded using my broken language skills to explain that there were two cats in a room, I continued to ask them what I should do. They nicely sent one young guard with me to see what I was talking about. Yet after he pocked his head in the window he asked me what we should do. I told him he was the guard and he should know what to do, but he said he didn’t and so we took the address of the basement room and I advised him to call the owner so that the cats could be let out. That evening I returned home from another appointment to find that the cats were still locked in the basement room. I went to my husband and told him that we would have to rescue the cats ourselves. But how? And how did they get trapped in there in the first place? We assumed after having a couple of storms that week that they had jumped through the open window to get out of the rain and got trapped. My husband had an idea for us to drop through the window an old sheet we had and to tie one end of it to the tree that was outside in order to allow the cats an opportunity to take the offer of salvation and climb out from their entrapment. It took some time but soon both cats made their way up the sheet and out the window. When I saw that the room was now empty I closed the window of that basement room hard so that they would not jump back in again. My husband of course smiles at me for my act of mercy for those cats and the guards, after I had told them that they were rescued, also thought my efforts were hilarious too. They couldn’t understand why I had cared so much about wild cats; I told them that I couldn’t understand why they didn’t care enough to find the owner of that basement room. So last night, walking home on the first night of November, I saw one of those rescued cats and my heart was warmed. If my husband and I had not intervened then there would be no cat to walk the same path I was on to cheer me up. I was grateful that the cat chose to take advantage of the escape route that we had for it. Then all of this brought to my mind how Christ offers each of us salvation in a trapped room as well, and that our choice in choosing to use that salvation freely offered was of our own. Not saying that what Christ did for us comes close to any comparison of saving a dirty street cat, but that’s how we were prior to our salvation, dirty, on the streets without a home, and trapped with no one else to give us a way out. These two cats are my reminder of salvation and a heart -warming joy that my husband and I have the blessing of continuously offering His line of hope to lost souls in which we share our lives with each and every day in this country. I just wish the cat would recognize who I was, at one time I thought she sorta nodded her head at me, you know like giving me a nod of thanks for what we had done, but that was probably just in my head:)
