Right now, as I type this, our orange kitten is lying peacefully in his kitty bed next to the desk, purring. He looks sweet and innocent. Calm, even. Peaceful.
But he’s hiding something.
You see, at any given moment, he will get up out of his bed, stretch, yawn, and somehow in the process transform into Biter Beast. Walk across the floor in your stocking feet? Good. Makes it easier for him to bite your toes. Sit down in a recliner? Great. Your legs will be at the perfect angle to expose your hapless ankles. You may not even see him coming. Sometimes, he’ll wait behind a piece of furniture for you to walk by, then dart out and intercept you for the attack. Or he’ll simply sneak up on you, so quiet you never heard him coming.
Is he a bad cat? No. He’s a kitten, and he’s not yet totally on the “people are for loving, things are for playing with” bandwagon. He’s not mean. He just sees people as toys, and doesn’t always understand that we don’t see ourselves the same way. Most of the time, he’s sweet, and he does put up with an awful lot from my four small children. He’s got a great purr, he’s cute, and he loves to curl up on your lap and just sit there. So, in order to have him, we take the bad—biting, litter boxes, and never being able to step away from our food for a second if we still want it to be there when we get back—along with all of the good.
Sounds kind of like what God does with us, doesn’t it? Just like we chose our cat from the city animal shelter, God chose us while we were unwanted. Even more amazing is that God adopted us into His family. Pumpkin is a part of our family now; we’re part of God’s. But perhaps most amazing of all is that even though we continue to cause God trouble, just like Pumpkin sometimes causes trouble for us, God still keeps us. He doesn’t cast us out of His family because we’re too much trouble. No, when God adopts us, He means it forever. He’s never going to give us back to Satan, no matter what we do.
How incredible is that? God didn’t have to save us in the first place. And He certainly didn’t have to give us repeated chances to live at peace with Him. Giving us even one chance would have been far more than we deserved. Yet He chose us knowing that we would act up sometimes, knowing that we’d make messes and cause Him grief.
But He didn’t choose us because we’re so wonderful. He chose us because He is. Not one of us was good enough on our own to deserve to be adopted into God’s family. Yet He chose us anyway. Yes, because He loved us, but also so He could display His amazing mercy in being kind to us.
There came a time, before things got better, when Pumpkin came this close to being returned to the shelter. But despite the fact that our offenses against God are far worse than Pumpkin’s misdeeds against us, we will never come this close to being removed from God’s family. He’ll never ask us to leave. We can rest secure in the knowing that His home is our home, both now and for eternity.
May our hearts be moved to amazement and incredible gratitude. He’s chosen us not just for now, but forever. We’ll never be unwanted.
Ever.
Ephesians 2:4-7—But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.
John 5:24—Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life.