I was away for a week recently, and during that break, a friend of mine gave me a book about cats. It presented questions that any cat owner would want to ask his or her cat. For instance, “What does it mean when your eyes are dilated and your ears are laying back?” The answer: the cat is anxious and upset about something, ready to run or pounce. On a contrary note, what does it mean when Baxter is fully stretched out on his back, sleeping soundly? Answer: this is a sign that he feels safe and secure. After reading the whole book with all its questions, I concluded that Baxter is one happy cat with little anxiety and much contentment.
Too bad we don’t have such a book for each other; a guide on how to read the signs we give about how the day is going, what our moods are, what brings us joy or causes us stress and frustration. However, after a while, we do learn some of these signals if we pay attention. We get to know what sets each other off. We can learn the connections between what happens, or what we make happen, and how others respond. We learn what buttons to push in each other to make us happy or sad, secure or anxious, peaceful or angry. Sometimes we may misread the moment, but for the most part, after we have lived with each other long enough and care enough to be concerned about the other’s responses, we figure it out. It is a key to living together.
God gives off signs to us as well. In fact, there is also a book that helps us interpret these signs. It’s called the Bible. As we enter into Lent this week, we need to take note of what the signs of God are in our lives and our world, and how to interpret them. Taking time to look for them because we care about our faith, and making room in our busy schedules to learn more about how to understand them is a vital part of our Lenten renewal. Two things can help in this regard. First, we need to pay attention to the signs. God is often subtle in His messages to us. Rarely do they come in lightning bolts or extraordinary visions. They come with the twists of the day, the conversations we share, the routine prayers we say. With the crowded lives we live, we are often just going from one thing to another, going through the motions to get on with it, and we miss the quieter messages, the signs of grace in our midst. To get God’s point, we need to slow down and be quiet.
Second, we need to read the book. The Bible is a compendium of thousands of years of people’s experiences of God expressed in various literary forms — stories, histories, laws, poems, letters, and special pieces. As we come to understand and appreciate these treasures through the lens of our tradition of faith, we see that God’s work of loving and saving us continues today in our lives and world. The scriptures lay out the track record of God’s ways, to help us recognize and understand the continuing signs of His presence and power today.
It is not just the ways of cats that appear mysterious to us. God’s ways are much more profoundly mysterious, and so they are often missed or dismissed as unintelligible. Take the time to stop, read, reflect and understand these ways a little more fully this Lent. There’s an added bonus for us in this Lenten exercise. As we learn to understand God’s signs better, we learn to live with each other more carefully and appreciate each other more fully.
