A Cat Named Grace

 

 

We have a cat named Gracie.  She is a shy thing, all black with a slinky, sensual stride.  We saw her at the vet one day.  She had been brought in by a good Samaritan who found her alongside the road where she had presumably been hit by a car.  Her pelvis was shattered and her leg broken so badly the bones were sticking out.  To top it off, she was pregnant with kittens that were stillborn a few weeks after we first saw her.  After an emergency C-section for the ones that could not be birthed because of her shattered pelvis, we brought her home.  We have since decided that she must have been a feral cat prior to her run in with the car.  It was only due to the kindness of strangers that she survived, but that didn't make her more sympathetic to people, only curious.

Despite her early disability, Gracie has conquered the tallest obstacles in our house.  She slinks through our lives, and although she is ever present in the background, we can seldom grasp her.  She will sidle up to my chair and let me reach down to pet her, but she will not let me look her straight in the eye or pet her head.  If I call her name, she will come within inches, but not so close that I can pick her up. Yet we know she likes us because wherever we are, she will always be lurking on the periphery.  Sometimes I think she likes us more than our other two cats do because she is always in our vicinity.

That's so much like grace.  Grace is something that few of us grasp, yet it is ever present.  It pussyfoots through our lives, stealthily, but ever watchful.  Most of the time it can't be defined. It can't be captured, it just is.   It surrounds us like air, and is just as elusive, as impossible to capture.

I actually named her for the missionary Gracia Burnham who was held prisoner for a year with her husband, Martin, in the Philippines.  While Martin was killed, Gracia survived that captivity and has been working tirelessly ever since through her foundation and as a guest speaker at conferences and churches.  For me, Gracia Burnham has come to exemplify what grace is all about. There are many definitions of grace, but for of us who are Christians it can be defined as 'God's unmerited favor':
God's love given freely without anything required in return, sanctification as a result of nothing more than God's favor, being granted the power to live the Christian life through no effort of our own.

Gracie, Gracia and Grace have something in common.  They are survivors.  They have been tested and tried and come our even stronger.  It's almost too much to contemplate, this grace.  Yet it is something freely given, it surrounds us even when we can't sense it and even when we don't deserve it, it is there.