Lap Cat

I really love my cat. He brings me a lot of joy. He waits at the door for me to come home, unless I come home at a time when he's not expecting me, in which case he staggers into the living room all bleary eyed a few seconds after I open the door trying to figure out why the schedule has changed. As soon as I sit down he's on my lap, rolling around and purring and all up in my face. And I take care of him -- I buy him expensive food made specially for indoor cats so he doesn't get super fat: I trim his claws so he doesn't get stuck on things (or me); I clean up his puke when he eats too fast and throws up on the living room rug. Lately I've been letting him sit on my lap while I'm at the kitchen table, eating breakfast or Internetting or writing -- encouraging bad behavior, I know. He wiggles around and tries to get comfortable, and even though he can't, he still stays, because he just wants to be close to me.

But invariably, after he's been calmly lounging as a lap cat for five or ten minutes, he starts to freak out. One second he's purring and purely content, the next he inexplicably wraps his front feet around my arm and starts biting my wrist, ears back, wild look in his eyes. I usually don't know what I've done to provoke him -- he just goes into attack mode.

As he went from cuddling to attacking me tonight, I thought about how we do that to God. Seriously, though. God takes care of us -- he provides us with the best spiritual food we could ask for; he keeps us humble and gracious so we don't harm the people around us; he cleans up the aftermath from our overindulgences, maybe not necessarily puke, but sadness or fear or loneliness. And most of the time we're so content; we lounge around, happy and purring, thankful to be loved and taken care of. But then sometimes, inexplicably, we turn around and -- WHAM -- we sink our teeth into his hand and start frantically kicking at his arm, totally ungrateful, taken over by some kind of wild anger. And he's probably like, "Whoa, what the. . .what did I do to deserve that??"

Though I wish I didn't have those moments of unwarranted freakout, I don't know how to. But once I've gone over to the other side of the room for a bit and sulked around, I always realize how much happier I am when I'm purring on God's lap. So I go back, of course. And he always lets me back up.


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"Because I'm so scared of being alone, that I forgot what house I live in." - Caedmon's Call