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Kristen Anne Glover

Five in Tow

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Mercy Hurts

Kitten

The small streak of fur dashed into the shadows so quickly, we could hardly tell what it was.

“It’s a cat, Mom!” Jonathan shouted.  “You have to stop!  Stop the van, Mom!”

I pulled over against the curb.  The children jerked the sliding door open and tumbled out onto the sidewalk before we came to a complete stop.  They ran to the spot where the animal disappeared and inserted their arms and faces and curious fingers into the prickly green shrubbery.

“Be careful,” I cautioned.  “You don’t know what it is!”

“Ow!”  Faith screamed and jerked her arm out of the bush.

“Oh, jeeze, Faith!  Get your hands out of there!  It’s probably rabid!”

“It’s a kitten, Mom!  Mom!  I can see a kitten!  Oh, Mom!  It’s so tiny!”  She scrambled on top a decorative stone wall that guarded a neat yard and peered in at the terrified animal.  I looked around for the neighbors who might not appreciate my child climbing on their wall, but no one was home.

“She’s hurt, Mom,” Jonathan said from below, bending branches into unnatural positions to get a better look.  The bush hissed at him.  “I can see blood,” he added softly.

I bent over and looked into the branches.  Something wild and fierce stared back at me with a fiery resolve to tear me to pieces if I so much as pointed a finger in her general direction.

“We’ve got to save her!” my children pleaded.

“There’s no way we’re going to get that kitten to come out, guys,” I reasoned.

But Jonathan was already climbing inside the shrub and Faith was leaning in from the top and before I knew it, I was holding a hissing, spitting kitten by the scruff of the neck. 

Rescue kitten

She smelled like death.  Yellow streaks of puss leaked down into torn and matted fur.

“She’s so cute!” my children exclaimed because they take no notice of details.  “Oh, look how little she is!  Can we keep her?”

We brought her home and stuck her under the faucet with a generous handful of antibacterial soap.  Her eyes grew ten times at the sound of the water and she hissed like a rattler, but when she was all wrapped up in a towel afterward she looked tiny and frail, not fierce.

“I don’t know if she’s going to make it,” I said when I saw the depth of her injuries and the way the bones ran jagged down her back.  “She’s so, so sick, and she hasn’t eaten in a long time.”

The children rushed off and came back with handfuls of cat food which they fed to her a piece at a time.  She ate greedily between hissing.

She drank all the little bowls of water they brought to her too, although she could barely reach them and when she did, her neck leaked out the sickness that was inside.

Cozy kitten

“We are not keeping that cat,” my husband said when the kids told him that God sent us a kitten.

But then he looked in at her, huddled in the corner of a cardboard box, and even he had to admit that there was nothing to do but show mercy.  That fragile, broken creature would not survive without it.

Days passed.  All the hair on her neck and chest fell out, revealing a hot abscess.  When she opened her mouth wide like a lion, no sound came out.  Her entire throat was aflame with infection.

By some miracle, the kitten survived.  She stopped hiding behind the washing machine and began to sleep with the children.  She met our older cat.

Attack kitten

“We have to find a home for that kitten,” my husband observed one day when the cat box was full and the cat food was nearly empty and we could hear the kitten sharpening her claws on the living room rug.

“We can’t give her away, Mom,” the children pleaded.  But that was the deal all along.

That adoption fell through, and then another, and each time, the kids grew more and more fiercely attached to the swirly-furred kitten in our house.

“When I grow up, I am going to keep that sweet little kitty,” Paul whispered, cupping the kitten in his freckled hands as she squirmed to get away.  He forced the kitten to sit on his lap long enough to sing her the love song he made up on the spot.

Watching it hurt.  We had given up time and resources to save this kitten, and in exchange, it was breaking my children’s hearts.

Silver tabby

But mercy is like that, isn’t it?  It hurts.  Mercy costs something, even when it’s a very small mercy like saving a stray cat.

The bigger mercies, like adopting children and rescuing prostitutes and loving the mentally ill, well, those mercies carry a cost that can crack a person right open.  Often, it means taking the hurt and destruction—the brokenness—into your own home and opening yourself and your family up to the consequences.

I think about these bigger mercies and I wonder if it’s worth the risk.  Is it worth the potential harm to my children to become a foster parent?  Is it worth the rage to get involved with the fight against sex trafficking?  Is it worth heartbreak to show forgiveness to those who don’t deserve it?

Swirled kitten

Because all I’ve done is rescue a cat, and even that has left me a little raw. 

But then Faith comes up to me with the kitten in her arms and says, “Do you think the kitten would have died without us?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Hmmm.  I’m glad we found her.”

“Even though we have to give her away?”

“Oh, yes,” Faith answers without hesitation.  “We saved her life, didn’t we?”

Indeed.

It is the obvious answer to the question.  We saved her life.

Mercy is worth that risk.  Mercy is worth that hurt.  We saved her life.  There is no hurt that could take away that joy.

Mercy was worth it.

The End

The End

Faith 19 Comments

{13} What if God…

What if God

What if God

Day 13 of 31 Days.  Click on the link here to find day one.

I have been awed at the way God has brought my eyes across Scriptures that directly relate to the story of Obscurity and the prince.  Romans 9:22-23 is one of those.  I love the opening line.  What if God…

What if God, who has the power, authority, and even right to demonstrate His wrath upon us, chooses instead to show us patience and mercy so that we might understand the riches of glory.  What if God did something like that? 

The good new is, He did.

Faith, From Enemy to Heir Leave a Comment

All Things New: 100 Beautiful Days of Motherhood {26}

Pink Rhododendron

Halfway through the morning, the weather changed.  The lazy grey clouds were thrown off over the mountains like covers, and sleepy-eyed sky appeared.

Kya had already drawn a fluffy cloud on her weather chart, but no one minded the inconvenience of erasing it and starting over with a yellow-rayed sun.

I was going to have to find my sunglasses.

It was warm enough—just—to play outside without mittens and take one more stab at winning the argument with Mom about running around outside without a coat.  It turned into the kind of day that makes the early lambs jump around in the field and compels dogs to roll in things they shouldn’t.

It was a day that felt new, like mercy.

Dry leaf and sunset

Mercy is something I need.  I have felt a little bit brown around the edges lately, a little too tired and buried a little too deep.  I am back to my old mistakes of taking on too much and saying no to too little.  All week I struggled to keep up in a race I never should have been running in the first place.

Little things got under my skin, like rocks, and I felt gravely.  I said things to my husband I shouldn’t have said and didn’t really mean.  It’s always easier if it’s his fault than if it’s mine.  It’s always easier to feel trapped by him than to acknowledge the fact that I’ve imprisoned myself.

But I don’t think he knows how to build a cage as well as I do.

If there’s one thing I am good at, it’s walling myself up with too many commitments.  I am good at finding ways to chain myself to the clock and the calendar and the to-do list.  I am good at scrambling my priorities and fighting him when he tries to set me free and straighten me out.

I think that if I can build a cage, then I can get myself out of it.  So I clench my teeth and set my resolve and make everyone miserable while I try to prove that I can do it.

The truth is, I can’t do it.  Not well, not godly, not in a way that is healthy.

This last past week was not healthy.

But today was the kind of day that forces me outside.  I have to hang something on the clothesline, even though nothing will dry.  I untangled the bed from the flannel sheets and extra blankets which have held us captive since sometime in October.  They hang head-down and penitent on the line.

Clothesline

It is good to be aired out, I think, and to start fresh.

I stand out in the yard and fill my lungs with the smell of the waking earth.  I notice that the deeply hidden daffodils and tulips are beginning to push their way up through the dark and the dirt and the dead of winter.  Their tender green shoots push aside the brown fallen leaves and stretch toward the new mercy of spring.  They are dirty, still, from being so long in the ground.

But they are growing again, even after a season of dormancy and darkness.

I am a little dirty too, a little rough around the edges.  But on this beautiful day of motherhood, I cling to the hope that God is not done with me yet.  My sins may be chronic, but so is His mercy.  He coaxes me out of the dirt and into the light.  I am well aware that I have not done everything right or well or good.  But I am also aware that God is in the business of making all things new—including me.

Crocus shoots

Parenting 10 Comments

I believe you can find grace for the mother you are and help to become the mother you long to be—a mom who has the freedom to choose the better things and enjoy her kids right now.

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