D is for DISOBEDIENCE

There are times in life when cats just need to learn to be obedient. Take Whitie for instance. Now I've written about him before and if you care to cast your mind back many months you might even be able to read about lovingly adorable he is. Of course, all those kind remarks I made back then were based on the fact of how I see him when he's good. But when he's bad , he's not so good at all and the rose tinted spectacles are often left lying in the corner.

Most days, he is a peaceful cat, content to eat the food that he gets first thing in the morning and around tea time and then slope off into the living room and the comfort of his cat basket, where he will lie motionless for several hours, the silence only being broken by his occasional loud snoring. He loves this room in winter because the candles we light in the evening have a strange soothing and calming effect on him and the soft lighting just sends him into dreamy world where he can fantasize about giant cooked mice and oceans made of milk. Usually however, the first signs of disobedience appear shortly after he has awoken and performed one of his over exaggerated stretches. Then after a short two way conversation with his owners which both sides understand perfectly well, despite the obvious language barrier, he moves towards the sofa, an area which he already knows full well is an exclusion zone to him. Nevertheless, he tries every night to make it his rightful sitting place and despite several warnings that his disobedience may lead to eviction out the back door, he becomes even more persistent and ever more vocal in his opposition. Finally as a last resort, he jumps up on to one of the other chairs that also carry the same exclusion order and drapes himself nonchalantly over the arm. Seconds later of course he is back in his basket with a first warning but sometimes disobedience can be misinterpreted for stubbornness and it's not long before he's on his travels again, tail swishing slowly and majestically, indicating his extreme displeasure at our lack of obedience. After all, this is his house and he was in the room before us and doesn't he keep the mice away and we can't sit in all the seats at the one time. There may follow a short or even extended period of exposing claws on bare flesh or the gentle closing of incisors on an arm in a seemingly playful manner but with intent to drive a message home and then the choice becomes painfully obvious. Obey or view the living room from the other side of the window. This is usually sufficient to impress upon him who is boss though I understand his problem because maybe we are not always consistent and occasionally he is allowed to recline on one of the seats.

Except last night it didn't work at all. I have warned him on numerous occasions that while sofas and chairs are out of bounds, most of the time, my son's bed in his attic room is never, repeat, never, within bounds. So last night as he stood in the corridor near the bedrooms, voicing his displeasure at my displeasure of seeing him not in his normal resting place, he found the door leading to the room that leads to the attic, slightly ajar. Despite several severe and loud warnings from the far end of the corridor, accompanied by foaming and gnashing and thumping of hands against wood, he continued to nose his way into the room and as I reached the door, I just caught the last traces of his tail disappearing up the ladder.

When I reached the bed, he was nowhere to be seen, but closer investigation indicated that he had entered the space at the back of the wardrobe and in the darkness all I could see was a nose, tow ears and two eyes peeping out from the back of the wardrobe which he had entered where one of the boards had become loose. Ten minutes later, after much dialogue which mostly centred around the phrase 'get out of there!' he emerged, ran past me, down the ladder and was sitting eloquently on the carpet in the kitchen when I made it back to base. In such instances of disobedience, there is no room for talk nor explanation, nor indeed a second chance and despite the inclement weather, he discovered the delights of outside much more quickly than he had hoped. Still, there he was this morning again, all forgotten, if not forgiven, but some things you just have to put behind you when you're hungry!

Man's disobedience caused him also to be excluded and while he tried to find all sorts of ways to please his Creator and win His favour, ultimately any sacrifice he made was never going to be enough. But God had already made a way, through the sacrifice of His own Son, so that man could be forgiven for disobeying and reunited with his Maker. Such was God's love for us that He didn't close the door for ever and has promised that those who believe on His Son will inherit life for ever with Him. And just as it took the obedience of Jesus to go to the cross, so it takes us to be obedient to His call and live the life that He wants us to live. In Romans 5 we read 'For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.' So where are we? Disobedient or Stubborn? Or just a bit of both?