My Cat

Once in a while some of us crank up our brains and attempt to understand things like what effect our prayers have on a God who knows the end from the beginning and is sovereign over everything. We may suspect it's some kind of both/and situation in a world we can only sort into either/or. It's pretty mind-bending stuff. We simply have not the capacity to process such things adequately. We must settle for a bit of a sense of it, at best - certainly not a really satisfying fullness of understanding.

When I ponder God and my relationship to Him, I sometimes think of my cat. She is close to me in a sense. She likes to rub against my leg and comes around for a scratch behind the ear. At dinner time she is very vocal about what she wants. She is comfortable with me and I suppose she thinks she knows me. But as she looks up at me when I come home from work, there is no way she can understand anything about my life outside of the house. Or even what I think about and do inside it. As I ponder which value capacitors to use in the tone circuit of the electric guitar I’m putting together she has no idea what it is about even if she sticks her nose into it. She has not, nor can she have, one iota of understanding of what it's like to make music or what it feels like to play the instrument, let alone what all that means to me in my soul. Normally she just naps on the floor when I'm working in that room. I don't really care that she isn't into the guitar. I find a bit of delight in that she even wants to be in the room with me.

Then there is the knowledge gap between me and the fish in the bowl in the kitchen. That is probably an even better analogy. The fish and cat know their dinner comes from me. At least from that one perspective they know that I have their best interest in mind. I'm careful to cultivate trust with them. I want them to feel safe with me. They understand very little beyond that, but that is really all that matters.

His ways are higher than my ways and always will be. I'm very ok with that.