FLYING NAMIKI KITTEN

"Mew." The sound came from outside my 2nd-floor Namiki apartment, but cats don't fly. "Mew." I heard it again. I rushed to the window, put my head out, and looked down. There on top of the bush on the ground was a large kitten tossing...a small newborn kitten into the air. It seemed to think it found a mouse and was playing with it. At the top of its arc--the level of the window--it let out a frightened yelp.

  “Hey, stop that!” I pulled on my garden gloves, and didn’t know what I was going to do, but headed outside. My college-age daughter, who saw what was happening, immediately emptied a cardboard box nearby and began to line it with towels for the newborn. My husband took off on his bicycle for the pet store for newborn kitten milk & feeding supplies. No one told anyone what to do; we just found ourselves moving.

Those are Emily's hands, and Kinya took the picture

Somehow, the larger cat was shooed away, and the smaller kitten was carefully carried and dried off—the umbilical cord was still attached—and placed in the box. We set it out for the mother cat but had to constantly keep the other kitten away, and saw we’d have to care for it ourselves.

  But the damage had been done. Its back was broken, and even when it moved, it dragged its back legs behind it. That night, it died—it was stiff the next morning.

But my daughter, a cat lover, held absolutely no bitterness towards that larger kitten. She saw it was a timid thing managed to gain its trust with time, and soon it was not only eating out of her hand, but crawling on our shoulders. When we moved, my daughter's biggest regret was that she'd have to leave behind a dear feline friend.

I am thinking if that cat could speak human talk, she might look back on her kitten days and say with regret about that newborn kitten, "I didn't know what I was doing, really."

Six years later, when my children were grown and gone and my hair was all gray, my husband and I went back to that neighborhood. Although other cats there ran away, one came purring up to us. I realized who it was—that former kitten! Isn’t this a little picture of what God does with me, I was thinking. He doesn’t punish me for the cruelties I wreak on others (no matter the degree of harm I cause) but takes His time—even if it takes my entire life—to gain my trust and waits for me to say, “I’m sorry about what I did before; I really didn’t know what I was doing.”

“The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance” (Rom. 2:4)