When I was growing up we always had pets. My sister, Kathy, loved cats so we had cats. My dad and I liked dogs, so we had dogs. And we had horses (but they didn’t generally stay at the house!) One of our long time pets was a cat named Morgan. We found Morgan in a liter of kittens that were born in the engine compartment of an old tractor. I don’t know what happened to all the other kittens but Morgan became our pet. Morgan was pretty smart. He could stand on his back legs and put his claws into the sliding screen door on the back of the house and shift his weight and open the screen door and come in. But the rude little cat never bothered to close the sliding door behind himself. The other side of the house had a regular screen door on hinges. He would put his claws into the screen and back up and couple of steps and then let the screen door slam into the door frame. It was his signal to us that he wanted to come into the house. There were many surprised guests that would be sitting in our house and hear what appeared to be a knock on the door. We would go open the door and Morgan would sashay into the room. The company would invariably give us one of those “how did he do that?” looks. We had huge pine trees all over our neighborhood. Tall, thin Loblolly southern pine trees. I don’t really know how tall they were but they were tall. I would guess that they were well over 50 feet tall. One night some varmint ran Morgan up one of those pine trees. Whatever it was must have scared that cat pretty badly because it would not come down. It was way up in the tree. It was not actually in our yard but, rather, in the Browder’s yard across the street. For the next couple of days Morgan just sat in the top of that tree and moaned with this horrible and loud meow. I’ve never really heard anything like it. It was not a pleasant meow but a painful and loud one. After a couple of nights of this awful noise the neighbors were not happy. They were losing sleep and it was very annoying. My father’s position had been “when the cat gets hungry or thirsty he will come down out of the tree.” But it was not working. Finally, on about the third day my mother called the fire department and asked them if they could help. So, the Andalusia Fire Department kindly sent a truck to our house for the firemen to rescue the cat. They could not reach the cat with their ladders so they decided that they would take their water hose and force the cat down out of the tree or blast him out of the tree. I don’t know what they were thinking but instead of starting the water spray above the cat to run him down out of the tree, they started beneath the cat and took the water spray up toward him. The result was that the cat just scurried the rest of the way to the very tip top of the tree. Now the cat is so high in the tree that the water pressure is not able to do anything to him, except give him a good bath. Now it was as though the sound of the screeching that the cat was making was just intensified. It was horrible. After another night of this wailing from the top of the pine tree my dad knew that something had to be done. He walked down the street to where our friendly neighbor, Dub Wilson (his name was Walter but everyone called him “Dub.” I never could figure that out but later I came to realize that it was short for the “W” in Walter.) Mr. Dub worked for Covington Electric Power Company and one of the things that he did regularly was to climb power poles. He had all the climbing equipment. Mr. Dub took his equipment, climbed that pole, and cut the top out of that Loblolly pine. The entire top of the tree, cat and all, came tumbling down. My dad and some other neighbors had taken my old pup tent and held it in the form of a net to try to catch the top of the tree. Somehow they managed to break the fall of the cat and keep it from killing him. I would have thought that Morgan would have taken off like a scared rabbit running for his life when he hit the ground. But he was so tired and weak and hungry that he just laid there. He did not move. Mom took him home and nursed him back to health but for hours and hours that cat did not move. You know what, to my knowledge, that cat never climbed another pine tree (or any other kind of tree) in his entire life. What’s the point of that story? Like that cat we often run from God. Just like my parents, the fireman, and Mr. Dub were trying to rescue the cat and help him, God is trying to rescue us and help us. But, like the cat, we do not realize it and we run from him. We try to hide. We think we don’t need Him. But the wailings of life give us away. We desperately need him. Isn’t it a tragedy that much of society thinks they don’t need God when, in fact, He is the very thing that they need more than anything else in this world. Here is a word from the Word: “No creature is hidden from Him, but all things are naked and exposed to the eyes of Him to whom we must give an account.” (Hebrews 4:13)
Posted on: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:24:59 +0000
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