Friday, September 21, 2012

Bringing Baxter Home

I lost Baxter once. He was less than a year old, and I was living in a house that had a small deck off the back door of the second floor. Baxter loved to be out there on a sunny day, and this was early September, a perfect Sunday afternoon, warm, bright and with just a hint of Fall on the leaves’ edges.  I had been out with Baxter for a couple of hours on that deck, and now I wanted to come inside to watch the evening news on TV. Baxter didn’t want to come. Every time I went to grab him, he ran away.  Frustrated, I decided to leave him on the deck while I went downstairs to the television. I never thought anything would go wrong, but it did.

 I was watching the news less than five minutes when I heard this commotion upstairs. I ran up the steps just in time to see Baxter’s hind quarters disappear off the deck with a jump to the lawn, two stories below. Another full grown cat came onto the deck as soon as I left it, and Baxter knew he was outsized so he took the only exit available. I didn’t see where he went, but since there wasn’t a bundle of fur on the lawn below, I knew he survived the jump.

 I was panicked, and my mind was racing with worry. Where did he go and what happened to him? I decided to walk around the neighborhood to look for him. I went up and down the whole dead-end street calling his name. There wasn’t a clue to his whereabouts. Since there was an open, undeveloped area behind the houses on this street, I figured he could be long gone, and I feared for his safety. You see, Baxter never had to face the big, bad world. He came to me at four months and never had to develop street smarts to make it out there. I was at a loss what to do. I felt heartsick.

Then I remembered the routines Baxter learned. When I would come home, he would be at the door waiting for me because he heard the garage door opening. The sound of the garage door opening meant I was coming home, and my coming home meant Baxter would be fed. The other association he learned was the sound of the lid being removed from the catnip container. As soon as he heard the squeak, he would come running for a nip of pleasure from the contents. This gave me an idea.

 I went into the garage and opened the door. Then I stood outside on the driveway and opened the catnip jar. It worked. Baxter was hiding in the next door neighbor’s bushes, and he came running out of there and over to me in a split second.  It was a wonderful reunion for both of us. He was home again, safe and secure, and none the worse for wear after this frightening ordeal.

When we are afraid and hiding from God, we need to listen for familiar sounds that call us home.  Maybe it’s the prayers we learned as children. Maybe it’s the sound of church bells or a familiar hymn.  Maybe it’s the memory of something your parents or grandparents said about God and God’s ways.  Maybe it’s your children’s questions about church. Whatever it is that provokes our memory about Who God is and His presence to us is a call to come home. “Big Cats” in this world may have driven us away, but since God is everywhere, we are never far from His comforting welcome—if we listen and are ready to respond.