I have just pushed the cat off my knee and got up to make some toast. I realise this will sound no big deal to most of you, but my cat is no ordinary cat. In fact in an editorial about six years ago, I used her maladjusted social incompetence to ponder how God might sorrowfully view our missing of his privileges because we refuse to foster his company.
We acquired this cat over ten years ago. Of indeterminate age, she had a number of deeply ingrained neuroses, and all our best efforts to coax her into the family hearth were met with suspicion and ingratitude. She preferred lurking under a dripping hedge to civilised living. For ten years, we have alternately wheedled her and castigated her, fortunately in a language she could not understand. Her reaction was consistent: she stayed safely remote.
That is, until recently. Over the last four or five months, she seems to have been re-born. For no discernible reason she has discovered the cat flap, colonised the knee of anyone sitting still, purred at levels never before imagined and generally entered the human race. Not in the fulsome way of some cats - she has her pride, after all - but unrecognizable as the mewling fugitive we have known for so long. She's like a new person.
She had her parallel at school the other day. For nine years at this school, I have coached the touch
football teams. None of them has been very good, and the worst ones have been awful. I have come to expect a sort of careless frolic in the Wellington northerly, ending in congratulations for some other coach and aphorisms about how it's all about enjoying the game. I began these platitudes with clenched teeth, but with repetition, I have almost come to believe them.
And then, this term, it all changed. She new team looked promising in the first game and confident in the second. They won a couple more and all of a sudden they were in the final and then, not satisfied just to be there, they won it. Someone's mother brought me round with smelling salts and.it cost me chocolate, but I went home in a sort of foolishly elated haze, and when I arrived, the cat sat on my lap.
I think there is a lesson to be learned from both the cat and the team. A local church asked me to preach them a sermon last month on the topic, "God Delays." I don't actually think he does: it just feels that way when he declines to adopt our timetable. It is fair to believe that God might have a timetable of his own. I suspect that much of our challenge is to trust God to know what he is doing and to adjust our wishes to his, rather than to our current Good Idea.
But it might take time for my wishes to align with God's wishes. It might even take time for other people to learn what I would like them to learn. And if they are not yet followers of Jesus and I am wishing they were, it is highly likely that my desire for them to pursue A B or C will not be fulfilled for my convenience. And I should not withdraw and declare them hardened against the gospel but foster their friendship, offering them care and above all listening, and wait for the spirit of God to move in his time, and in theirs. I have been seeing something of this recently in my own church.
If it takes nine years to see a sports team deliver the goods and ten years to see a simple cat respond to daily kindness, we might expect the profound changing of a life - and we should be hoping for nothing less - to take what it takes. Let us not be impatient, nor give up, nor seek to manipulate. Australian writer Michael Frost says that deep people don't use shallow methods, and we should be ready for God's gentle power to move in his own time. Certainly Paul was struck to the ground in a spectacular blaze of glory but he is presented as an exception, and anyway it took a lengthy process to get him there. A friend of mine is fond of saying, "~The story's not yet finished," and for all of us, that's just as well. What's nine years, or ten, in an eternal time-frame?
