Living-Deliberately.com

Large families with little financial means rarely get the opportunity to minister much to those in need. I make sure our hand me downs find good homes and we offer hospitality much more often than it is accepted, but by and large we are filled with a desire to give more than we have means to fulfill. It is sometimes as strange place to be.

And yet we have been blessed richly since moving out here to the country to minister to many starving and homeless lives. When we first arrived, they were here waiting, watching in the shadows, trembling with fear and hunger and curiosity. Within the week our porch had become a soup-kitchen line, with nervous eyes focused laser-like upon us, as we handed out meals and drink, knowing they remained ready to flee lest we be lying in our kindness.

The kids wanted to name and take in every one. One was a very young mother and brought us her baby in earnest desperation. She struck me with her pragmatism; I don’t think she really wanted to be around us but she knew we held life and she put up with us long enough to return to health to secure a home for her baby. When an orphan was abandoned, unable to eat on it’s own, she was then strong enough to take it in herself. We saw a second generation benefit from our efforts. There was a protective father, I think probably the father to a whole group of the….litter, because I am speaking of cats after all, and I watched in amazement as he was more than just the neighborhood Tom and actually seemed to shepherd this little group of vagabonds.

They weren’t all cats; there were two dogs, ugly and unwanted and they refused to leave. We honestly weren’t so eager to reach out to these two….the one with her rotting flesh and the other with a smelly coat ridden with parasites. In the months that followed we came to understand our role with the older one: it was to mercifully put her suffering to an end. And with the younger, it was clean him, love him, and to allow him do what he so wanted to do: belong.

The Taming of Everett was a story that hasn’t yet really been told. He is an animal that is not quite mentally complete, yet who is one of the most affectionate and eager felines I’ve ever come across. He leaps from his daytime hiding place to our porch each night after the sun goes down for a late night dinner and a few hours of love in a warm house; then returns to the night until the passing of another day. He’s a wonderful little friend, yet unwilling to completely trust and lay down the burden of previous rejection.

Today another little hungry, starving life ventured to our door. Maybe a relative of Everett; same long fur, same eyes, but a body gray in color rather than orange. She has ribs that protrude and a raspy meow. Andrew found her and brought her in; she devoured a bowl of food with paranoid desperation, frequently looking over shoulder at us. Against caution, Andrew named her “Francesca” and declared her his.

David, our “not really a cat person” family member, took this all in stride, a good sport to endure our apparent magnetism for dejected animals. There is a sadness about each one of these little animals so abandoned and alone. It is simply easy to be kind to the least of these; it strikes me how it requires so little of me and yet they are all here because others found it simply too hard to do.

I do hope one day that we are able to give to humankind multiples more than we give to animals. But as I stroke the coat of one more cold and shivering animal, I realize that if I can not do to the least of these, I will never do to more.

Tonight after we opened gifts and read the story from Luke, the children took the Mary, Joseph, Jesus, and angel figures and added them to the cow and donkey waiting in the barn. Animals in a barn bore witness to that great and mighty thing…..A simple thought that leaves me silent meeting the profound beauty of it.

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