Last week we had to say goodbye to one of our cats from this post. The hero of the story is alive and well, but his orange buddy has gone on to greener pastures (the back west pasture, to be exact). This story happened when they were both tiny. (The pictures were taken when they had grown up more.) We try to celebrate these good, fun things, keeping in mind that faith is a relationship, not a formula.

One morning, a few weeks after we got the kittens, Nutmeg’s much-beloved light-haired kitty escaped the garage. My husband, needing to leave for work, cracked the garage door slightly, then carefully backed out and drove away.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t aware that…

the kittens enjoyed crawling up into the engines of vehicles.

I called and called for the poor kitten. He had never wandered more than five feet away from the garage. Seeing neither hide nor hair of him for more than an hour, I called my husband and asked…

if he could go out to his truck and look for…

little bits of fur…

He did, but he saw nothing.

When Nutmeg woke up, she wandered out to the garage to greet the new kittens, and I didn’t enjoy telling her that her light-haired one was missing. We kept looking throughout the morning, to no avail.

I expected my daughter to be heartbroken. She can have a stormy temperament, and the kittens were the joy of her life. After lunch, I patted her on the head, and she looked up at me with a smile and said,

“Mom, can you ask Jesus to find my kitty?”

Yikes. This is the type of prayer I dread praying, especially for a four-year-old child. It’s so much easier to pray things that are likely to happen anyway, or at least to pray on behalf of people who are able to process the reasons a prayer would go unanswered.

I started mentally preparing a child-sized sermon on disappointment – that sometimes bad things happen, that we don’t always see the reasons, and that somehow, like a movie with a Good Director, it will all make sense in the end.

Instead, I prayed with her, “Jesus, please find Kitty Kitty.”

I probably spent two hours total, throughout the day, looking for the kitten, wondering how we would find a replacement to keep the other one company.

At 5:00, my husband called to say he was headed home. I was glad for an early evening.

“And I have the kitten,” he said.

Uh… WHAT?!

I wasn’t prepared for this!

“Yeah,” he said. “I went back to my office to do some work, and I heard meowing out the window. So I went out, and the kitten was under my truck.”

As far as we can tell, this is how Kitty Kitty spent his day:

6:00 a.m. Crawl up under the truck hood.
6:15 a.m. Ride 30 minutes into town, half of it at 70 mph.
6:45 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. Stay inside the truck engine, in a busy parking lot, ALL DAY LONG.
5:00 p.m. Crawl out of the truck at just the right time to be heard meowing.
5:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. Cling to my husband’s scrubs all the way home.

I asked my husband if he was sure it was the same cat.

“Seriously?!” he asked.

Oh me of little faith…

After that, the kittens were not allowed outside again for a long time, while we fed them bacon grease and doughnuts so they would fatten up and not fit inside the engine anymore.

Just kidding. But I have discovered that a bowl full of heavy cream is effective in bringing out a hiding kitten.

Sweetness, apparently, is something all of us can understand.