Thursday, November 8, 2012

Catch Me If You Can

If I am away for a while, Baxter likes to play a game with me when I return.  He crouches with his front paws down and his back ones up and stares at me with a funny “growl”. When I catch his look, he takes off running. At first, I didn’t understand the game, so I would just laugh and continue about my business. But then, he would return, and do it again. This time running half way and stopping to look back at me. Finally, I caught on to my part. I was to run after Baxter and tag him when he stopped. Sometimes he would try to hide himself by stopping with his head under the bed and his butt sticking up in the air.  My job was to grab him around the middle and say, “I got you!”  Then he would roll over for a quick belly scratch, and depending on his mood, either start the whole game over again, or call it quits.

This silly game of cat antics reminds me of a serious part of divine tricks. God sometimes plays a game of “catch me if you can” with us. He runs ahead of us and invites us to follow. We can’t always predict where He is going to go and how He will present Himself when we get there.  Especially when we have been away from Him for a while, God wants to engage us in a personal chase. Can you find Him and keep up with His antics?  Sometimes we expect God to be sedate and formal, and God chooses a different way to picture Himself for us.

 Maybe He’s a thoroughbred running at full speed and urging us to run along-side to feel strong and free. Maybe He’s a clown doing outlandish postures and gestures to get us to laugh at ourselves and life in general.  Maybe He’s a silly cat provoking us to pay attention to Him after periods of lonely neglect. God has many faces to show us. His transcendent love comes in ways that can be unconventional and unexpected. While He always plays a good game with no malice in mind, God does not have to follow our rules when engaging us. He can change the playing field, reset the time period, reconfigure the teams and reassign the scoring mechanisms. Then we are left with a choice.  Either we play the new game on its new terms, or we leave the game and pout about sitting on the sideline with nothing to do.

The spiritual life is not a single, straightaway track. It is a cross-country route with many challenges and unpredictable situations along the way. God leads the way, but we sometimes have to look for Him and how or where He is running. He urges us forward, sometimes with a stare, sometimes with a “growl”, sometimes teasing us with only a glimpse of Himself, and sometimes stopping to rest along the way. But He won’t stop moving through the changes of our lives and calling us to play along with Him. At first, we might not figure out what the game is, but if we keep engaged, we eventually will discover how to have fun with it.

“Catch me, if you can!”  God says. We won’t do it, but we sure can enjoy trying, and become holy in the process.