My cat, Godfrey, was not happy with me. It was time for dinner, he was hungry and I hadn’t fed him. So, each time I walked into the kitchen he ran over to me, cried, ran back to where we feed him and then looked back over his shoulder at me. I got it, but he didn’t think I got it.
I couldn’t feed him because he was going to the veterinarian the next day for an endoscopy. You see, Godfrey tends to toss his cookies and the endoscopy was supposed to help us understand why. The problem is Godfrey didn’t understand all that.
I tried to explain it to him. I told him he couldn’t eat because if he ate, the endoscopy wouldn’t work, and if the endoscopy didn’t work we wouldn’t be able to see what was wrong with him, and if we couldn’t see what was wrong with him, he would keep barfing. But I could tell he didn’t get it. He just sat there staring at me, meowing plaintively.
I tried speaking very slowly. I’ve even spelled it out for him, e-n-d-o-s-c-o-p-y, but it wasn’t registering. He knew I loved him and fed him every day, and it didn’t make sense to him why I was not feeding him this night.
The thing is, Godfrey is a smart cat. When he wants me to hold him he gets up next to me and taps me on the shoulder with his paw. When he wants a certain type of food, he walks into the pantry and taps on the bag with his paw. But he doesn’t see and think on the level of complexity that I, as a human being, can, and I can’t explain it to him in any way that will satisfy him.
I’m confident God is farther above us than I am above Godfrey. If He wasn’t we would probably be disappointed in Him. I suspect that also means there are some painful things we go through that, as much as God may want to explain, we are not capable of understanding. He sees so much and understands the cause and effect of things on a much higher level of complexity than we could ever understand. So, instead, at times, He just asks us to trust Him.
Now if I can just figure out how to explain that to Godfrey. GS