Most of my life has been shared with housecats. The other day I tried to tally them up. Between my earliest years growing up in Indianapolis and the years my family has lived here in Zionsville, I’ve been on petting terms with at least 20 felines.

Cats tend to divide humanity into two groups. There are those who love them, and those who wonder whose bright idea it was to invite such self-absorbed, preening divas into the sanctity of our homes. The domestication of the cat was apparently accomplished centuries before the time of Christ. Ancient Egyptians reverenced them as gods. This was an idea that cats appear to have taken a little too seriously.

You’ve heard about the difference between cats and dogs, right? Dogs look at their masters and say, “You love me, you feed me, and you meet all of my needs. You must be God!” Cats look at their masters and say, “You love me, you feed me, and you meet all of my needs. I must be God!”

I saw a program on the Discovery Channel a few years ago that lent some validity to those old stereotypes. Dogs display an intuitive sense that their human companions are well suited to be their masters. But cats will have none of that. The classic feline behavior of rubbing against our ankles is apparently a way of saying, “I will defer to you as my larger companion, but I’m every bit your equal.”

That being said, I fall into the cat-lovers camp. I find them to be fascinating creatures. Over the years I have shared life with Calvin, Pixie, Mandy, Smokey, Snowball, Midnight, P.J., and at least two Blackies. Currently we own a collection of barn cats, all of which are named after vegetables. Their numbers have included Carrot, Turnip, Pepper, and Olive.

Some cats sit in windowsills and watch the world go by. That’s fine. But I’ve derived the greatest joy from knowing cats that seem to dream up borderline behaviors (aside from plotting to take over the world). Cinders, for instance, habitually collected white socks in his mouth after we had gone to bed and then left them in a trail from our upstairs landing to the kitchen. Perhaps they were directional lights to his food dish.

One of my childhood cats, Amos (all 16 pounds of him), was tenacious. On several occasions he climbed the side of our house and ended up hanging onto my parents’ second floor bedroom window screen. He would tag alongside my mom as she gathered up the laundry and watch her throw it down the clothes chute. One day his curiosity met its match against gravity; he peered into the chute, lost his balance, and tumbled two stories into our basement laundry basket.

Of all our cats, Shenanigans was the most exasperating. She was beautiful – a magnificent purebred North American tabby that we inherited from a family battling allergy issues. But her personality was prickly, to say the least. She acted as if our touches were personal violations. “Wow, she’s really grumpy,” said the vet. She routinely hocked up hairballs just after we cleaned our carpets, and always managed to catnap, and thus shed, on a stack of clean laundry. She was the least “value added” pet we have ever had. To top it all off, she lived for 16 years (which came to feel like every one of her 112 cat-years).

Friends and family members thought we were crazy. “You have to get rid of that cat. Why do you put up with her?” We asked ourselves that question many times. The answer, I think, is that we had made a commitment to Shenanigans. She had become family. And we didn’t find it easy to part with her just because she was so happiness challenged.    

For that reason, Shenanigans and all of the cats I have known have taught me a great deal about grace. Grace is the lavish, unconditional, and absolutely unmerited kindness of God. No one can earn or deserve grace. It is given simply because one exists. It is poured out in spite of less-than-stellar personality, character, and performance.

We chose to extend grace to Shenanigans because, quite frankly, the only hope for our own present and future is that others will extend grace to us. I, too, can be grumpy. People who love me can find me exasperating. And while I don’t expect one day to hock up hairballs on the carpet, grace is the assurance that I won’t become dispensable if I do.

If we think it’s hard to herd cats, think how hard it has been for God to manage us. No wonder people sing that his grace is amazing.