293 The Cat Ate My Monitor

   (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “The Cat Ate My Monitor”, originally shared on January 10, 2024. It was the 293^rd video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.) 

   We have no excuses before God. Only a Savior. Today, we’re going to find out why.

   We took in a stray cat a few months ago.

   It had been hanging around our house. It approached me when I was doing some of the videos that we do. I saw it among the trees when I was doing yard work.

   It seemed to want human contact but would run away if I stepped toward it. It foraged for food in our backyard.

   The skinny feline took up residence there. And on our roof. We started to put out food and water for it and it would dig in as we put it on the ground. It slept on the dirt or in a bush.

   Sometimes it allowed us pet it. It would purr. And then it would bite!

   It seemed to want to be with us and we could barely walk around without tripping over it because it would rub against our legs.

   We started to wear gloves when we petted it, or its “nips” would draw blood.

   It is a tortoiseshell cat and we learned that biting and batting are as much a part of tortoiseshell’s attitude toward humans as is showing gratitude and affection. It’s called their “tortitude”.

   We bought a bed for it and put it on a covered table we are storing under our covered patio in the back.

   Do you see where I’m going with this?

   We regularly have racoons and opossums in our backyard and roof at night, and one night we were awakened to the cat screaming from its bed at three visiting racoons.

   We allowed it to live in the screened-in porch part of the covered patio at night. Then day and night.

   Then, one night, the racoons came by to see it, and the cat was furiously throwing itself against the screen door to get out and take them on!

   That night, she became an indoor cat.

   We bought a litter box, and it intuitively seemed to know how to use it. It started clawing the furniture, so we discouraged that behavior and bought it a scratching post. Still, not scratching what it shouldn’t is a work in progress. Not nipping people is also a work in progress. We have the scars and the wounds to prove it. 😊

   It didn’t have a collar, and no ID tag. We began to think that it might have had a home, but that some people in the neighborhood who had moved hadn’t taken it with them. Or maybe it had been put out because of its somewhat anti-social behavior. Or maybe it had never had a home.

   Some people believe that tortoiseshell cats are valuable because they think that they bring “good luck”, especially the male ones, so we didn’t put up any posters. But there were no “lost cat” posters put up in our neighborhood, either.

   We took it to the vet and found out that it didn’t have an identity chip, but that she was a female. She had most probably been spayed at some point, but the vet couldn’t tell for sure without shaving the cat’s tummy, which we didn’t want to do since she was now going to be an indoor cat.

   Tortoiseshell cats often pick a favorite, we learned, and that seems to be me. And our son when he’s home, even though Sally feeds and cares for her and has been, with our son, her most consistent advocate. Maybe she picked me because she saw me first.

   Or, I’ve thought, maybe it’s because she somehow knows that I, who have been the hardest to convince that we should care for her at every step of her becoming an indoor cat, is the one that she most needs to win over.

   It has reminded me of the mother who was asked if, among all her children, she had a favorite. “Yes, I do,” she replied. “It’s the one who needs me the most.” Maybe that’s why.

   Then, the other day, the limits of my patience were tested.

   Maybe it was because she was more traumatized by the tree-trimmers that had been outside earlier in the day than she had indicated. Maybe it was just because of her “tortitude”.

   But, she jumped up on my computer desk where I had been working, where she comes to get my attention, show affection and get head scratching, where she rubs against the monitor and is fascinated by the moving curser on the screen. Where she was doing all these things.

   And then, suddenly, she turned and bit the corner of the monitor! About an inch of the left side of the monitor went blank and I lost access to the basic controls of the system!

   The cat ate my monitor! (Shout-out, BTW, to DELL’s excellent customer service. 😊)

   And believe it or not, I thought about a lesson in the Gospel text that will be read all over the world this coming Sunday! 😊

   In John 1:43-51,

⁴³The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” ⁴⁴Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵Philip found Nathanael and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” ⁴⁶Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” ⁴⁷When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” ⁴⁸Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” ⁴⁹Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” ⁵⁰Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” ⁵¹And he said to him, “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

   Human beings are a lot like our cat, Ella.

   We were created for a perfect relationship with God and with one another and with all of Creation. But, for our “Yes” to that relationship to mean anything, God had gave us the ability to say “No.” And we did say “No.” And evil entered the world. But God did not give up on us, and finally came to die a gruesome death on the cross to restore that living relationship with the one true living God.

   Creation is why God can be seen everywhere.

   Sometimes, people will say that they encounter God in nature more than they do in church. I get that. In fact, encountering God in nature, in God’s creation, gives people no excuse for not encountering God. And even that is not the whole story.

   Paul writes in Romans 1:20-21,

20 Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse; 21 for though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened.

   We can say that, “the dog ate my homework.”

   We can even say that, “the cat ate my monitor.”

   But we can’t say that we can’t understand or see God. We don’t have an excuse.

   Christians also encounter God in nature. But that encounter does not give us the whole story. That contact can only take us into ourselves. A relationship with God takes us to the cross.

   When we worship as a Christian community, in a church, we gather together in the presence of God, “to honor him as God” and to “give thanks to him,” as Paul said.

   We gather together to honor God and to thank God that we have a Savior!

   In one of Taylor Swift’s music videos, “Anti-Hero”, she stands with a pointer before a chalkboard on which is written, “Everyone Will Betray You.” I guess we can all have bad days, but I don’t think that’s true, though it may seem like it sometimes.

   And, if the “You” in that sentence means “everyone”, then sometimes everyone must also be the betrayer. If it is true, then who are you betraying?

   And how do we deal with that?

   The principle in Leviticus 4:19-20, may seem harsh.

19 Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: 20 fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered.

   But it is actually a moderating principle, preventing people from a cycle of ever-increasing violence. An eye for an eye and it’s done.

   Jesus takes our response to resistance from others a step further, when he says, referencing Leviticus 19:18, in Luke 6:31, and in Matthew 7:12,

12 “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

   And he goes even farther in Matthew 5:43-45!,

43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ 44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

   How can we sinners do this? How can we love even our enemies? The apostle John writes in 1 John 4:18-19,

8 There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 19 We love because he first loved us.

   God calls all of us into ministry in daily life, and he empowers us with lives that are transformed by the Holy Spirit, and we continue to grow in it.

   Kaiser Steel in Fontana went bankrupt years ago. A member of the church that I served in San Dimas was hired to find saleable uses for its physical assets in order pay the company’s debts, mostly to its employee’s pension fund. As I understand it, he sold land for a raceway. He sold mines for sanitary landfills. He raised a billion dollars and paid the debts. And then he was let go. Human behavior is often unpredictable. But God’s love is steadfast.

   We love God. We are received by God. We even live in God’s presence, and then with no warning we bite and we bat at God and at one another and at all of Creation. We live as though we don’t need God. As though we are not grateful. We sometimes think about life without Him.

   We are at the same time saints and sinners. We live in the already here but not yet perfected Kingdom of God because we are still not perfect.

   And yet, God continues to love us and to care for us.

   And God continues to call we frail human beings into service as his children and his friends, in the living reality of his transforming presence.

   As Jesus says in the gospel of John, in what Martin Luther calls the gospel in miniature, John 3:16,

16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  

   What did Jesus see in Phillip, or Nathanial, or in any of his disciples? Or any of us for that matter? They didn’t seem to have any credentials at all, except a willing ness to follow Jesus. Jesus Himself came from a town with a bad reputation. That didn’t seem to be a problem.

   Rick Warren said, “God doesn’t call the qualified. God qualifies the called.” Yet the disciples. never seem to understand. For three years. They were with Jesus, watching him, being taught by him, witnessing his miracles, and they never seemed to get the point until well after His death and resurrection. It’s almost comical.

   Yet God called them his disciples, his students. And then his apostles, his “sent ones.”

   And God calls us his ambassadors, as Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:20-21,

20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

   We are not always who we want to be by our own strength, but we are always the righteousness of God by the Grace of God. God has taken us in to be a part of his household.

   And, in spite of our rootless past and sometimes rebellious present, God calls us to turn away from our old selves, live in newness of life, and follow Him.

   Praise be to God!