“Most cats, when they are Out want to be In, and vice versa, and often simultaneously.” - Louis F. Camuti, DVM
Our bedroom door doesn’t latch easily. Why does that matter?
This morning around four, I was jerked out of sleep by a faint scratching sound. As a crack of light widened around our bedroom door (my father is an early riser, hence the light), I realized I hadn’t gotten our door latched the night before. Shadow, trapped in our room most of the night, was taking advantage of that fact. I heard her wrestle the door with her claws until the opening was wide enough for her to slip through. Once she was into the living room and on her way to the food dish, I crawled out of bed and shut the door behind her.
I didn’t get it latched.
No sooner had a laid my head on my pillow than the same crack of light appeared, piercing its way through my closed lids and straight into my retinas. Shadow was back, pushing her way through my boundary into the spot she’d been in only a moment before.
Can’t she make up her mind? My tired brain wondered. Why won’t she settle in and let me sleep? As soon as I thought it, I was reminded of the above quote by Louis Camuti. Yes, cats always love to be on the other side of any door. After all, any closed door must be locking them out of untold delights.
Not that Shadow is extreme in her desire to be somewhere else…anywhere else. As seen in my last post, her borderline paranoia actually keeps her on the inside of most borders, real or imaginary. Her predecessor in our hearts and lives, Poppy, was the opposite.
Poppy obtained me when I was a single graduate student in Virginia Beach. Where Shadow is largely passive, Poppy was aggressive. Where Shadow is timid, Poppy was bold. Where Shadow fears crossing boundaries, Poppy crashed through them whenever possible.
He loved the outdoors. He scorched through the door whenever my roommates or I opened it more than an inch. If I managed to block his way, he tore into my ankles with his teeth, venting his frustration at being kept in. When he made it past my foot and into the open air, he was sometimes gone for days at a time. I worried, of course. Little harm could come to him in the domesticated woods behind our house, though, and he always came back.
When I got married and my husband and I moved into a different part of town, it was a different story. Our apartment was only a block from two main roadways, once of which—Ferrell Parkway—was a main traffic artery. Mindful of the danger to even a hefty beast like Poppy, I worked hard to keep him indoors. He fought and moped. His attention to the door became obsessive. When we brought home a shy kitten named Shadow, his jealousy made the situation even worse. I decided to let him out onto our second-floor balcony. What could be the harm? After all, he couldn’t jump from that height…could he?
He could. Two days later, the urge toward freedom became too great and he did jump. He was unharmed by his leap, and bolted across the lawn and out of sight. As his absence stretched to a day, then two, then past his record of four days, I became increasingly worried.
Sorry, there is no happy ending. I never saw Poppy again.
I still miss my renegade feline. He was so desperate for what he saw as freedom, though, that he refused to accept my greater wisdom. He refused to remain with me. I’ve tried to convince myself that he found a home more to his liking. In my heart of hearts, though, I fear his willfulness led him to a lonely and painful end.
Poppy’s attitude isn’t unique among creation. Nor are cats in general the only creatures to think there must be something better beyond a closed door. It’s an old, old story.
“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die’” (Genesis 2:16-17, ESV).
We all know what happened next. (If you don’t remember the details, you can find the story in Genesis 3.) When you look at it, God gave Adam and Eve a pretty wide boundary. They weren’t restricted to eat from only one tree and leave the rest. No, they were allowed to choose from all the fruit of creation. In all creation, there was only one thing they were not to do. That one boundary proved too much.
As a result of their actions, all of humanity still lives east of Eden. We still reach out our hands, pushing God’s boundaries to the breaking point. Cain killed Able. Noah had to build the ark. Even Abraham, the great patriarch who is commended for his faith in Hebrews 11, stepped beyond God’s will at least once, when he decided not to wait for God’s promise and had a child by Hagar instead (Genesis 16).
David, a man after God’s own heart, pushed the boundaries (2 Samuel 11). The Israelites did it, over and over again. It happened in the early Church. It happens today, in each one of us, as we hate our neighbors instead of loving them; as we lie to our spouses; as we cheat employers, customers or the government; as we call evil good. Christians do it as we place work or ministry ahead of family, as we fail to draw the line between sin and still-loved sinner, as we keep silent out of fear…or speak from our own anger instead of God’s. We step beyond God’s will and push past God’s closed doors…too often into our own destruction.
In all of history, only Christ didn’t willfully push by God’s barriers and fall into sin. Not that he wasn’t tempted. The record is there in Matthew 4 and Luke 4. That’s where God’s saving grace comes in. The writer of Hebrews says of Jesus,
“For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (4:15-16, ESV).We shouldn’t break through God’s boundaries; that’s obvious. We all do it, though. We can’t help ourselves. The good news is that, unlike Poppy, we have a chance to undo what we’ve done. It’s called confession. When we see how far we’ve stepped out of God’s will and desire to step back into His light (1 John 1:5-7), Jesus is there to pull us in and mend fences.
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
On the other hand, “If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us” (1 John 1:10).
Yes, we can keep pushing…and pushing…and pushing. If we do, we’ll get exactly what we want; separation from God and a life that’s spinning further and further away from Him (that’s the definition of hell; did you know?). If we turn, though, and walk back toward that light, we’re more like Shadow coming back into the bedroom. And doesn’t a warm spot on the bed sound much nicer?
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