I can thank my mother-in-law for this title.
It came after we lost our cat this last Sunday evening. After a nice dinner outside on our covered porch, we gathered everything back inside and were ready to head to church when someone noticed our cat was missing. We have two cats. One is a longhaired Himalayan mix named Brownie, and the other is a rescued black and white shorthaired cat named Oreo. We also once had a solid white puffball of a cat named Donut. We like cats, and we like snacks.
This time it was Brownie who went missing. I say this time. Every time one of the cats goes missing it’s Brownie. In his heart of hearts he is an outdoor kitty forced to live a house cat life. This brown pile of fur has spent more than one night outside. Brownie is almost thirteen years old, and he’s made seven moves with our family during that time. How the cat always finds his way home to the right house is beyond me.
By the time we realized Brownie was missing, it was time for us to be walking out the door for church.
My husband had worked Sunday morning, so we had decided to all wait and attend church together that night. I’m not a fanatic about not missing church, it was just that the message this week was going to cover dinosaurs, and I just couldn’t wait to hear it.
My daughter was distraught. Since she was six weeks old, she has lived every day of her life with him. I assured her that the cat would mostly likely be sitting right at the back door when we returned from church. She was not convinced, and I could tell that panic was about to set in. I shuffled her into the van anyway. I knew he would come back. He always comes back. My husband drove up our street, and we all looked for the cat out the van windows. The next thing I knew, my husband is pulling back into our driveway, insisting that, with six of us, we could find Brownie.
We all trooped back into the house, and did a quick room to room search to make sure he had not just fallen asleep somewhere. Then we ventured outside to search the woods just behind our house and the yards of the neighboring homes. A creek runs at the back of our yard separating our neighborhood from the next one over. As I called out to Brownie, over and over again, (All the while, muttering a few explicatives in-between… See, I did need to go to church.) a man from the next neighborhood happened to be out in his backyard, and heard me.
The man called out to me and asked if I had lost a cat.
I told him I had, and he asked what color the cat was. Seriously? I said, “Brown.” He laughed and said, “Oh. Of course!” He said he had seen a dark colored cat coming out of the storm drain at the front of his yard a few moments earlier. My husband and daughter jumped in the car, and drove over to check out the sighting. My teenage son jumped in his car, too. He’s always willing to help if it involves his getting to drive.
After what seemed like forever, they were back without the cat, and my daughter was even sadder. So we searched the house… Again. Every closet, cabinet, and hidey-hole we could think of. We checked the garage, too. No brown cat. My daughter and I went back outside, but we looked out front this time. We walked up the street looking and calling. We turned and walked down the street. I began to remind my daughter of all the times Brownie had escaped and come back. We got to the end of the street and turned around again to head back home empty handed.
It was then that I saw him. He was walking home.
(I like it when I’m right.) I raised my arm and pointed. “There he is.” I’m sure we passed right by him. I’m sure he could hear us calling out his name, and chose to ignore us. Still, my daughter ran to him, and scooped him up loving on him and cooing to him as if he had done nothing wrong. Me? I wanted to make a scarf out of him. It was now too late to go to church, and I might never know what my pastor thinks about the dinosaurs.
Still that which was lost is now found. And as annoying as Brownie is sometimes, he’s family. And like the parable Jesus told of the lost sheep, I was reminded that a good shepherd will leave the ninety-nine behaving sheep to go look for the naughty one who happened to wander off. He’s not satisfied until all His sheep are safely in the fold. And like my daughter with Brownie, he scoops us up, loves on us and brings us safely home.