When I got Jeff, I had limited experience with pets.
When I was a child, we adopted a stray cat named Mr. Lubner. Mr. Lubner came and went as he pleased. I suppose I expected Jeff to be much the same. Friendly enough, but at a distance.
Jeff and I would live separate, respectful lives under the same roof. He would check in when he was hungry and check out when he wasn’t. There might be occasional moments of affection, but they would be light and short. For the most part, we would simply be two beings sharing the same space while living our lives apart.
Boy, was I wrong.
For the first several weeks, our relationship was something like that. Jeff didn’t trust me, and honestly, I didn’t completely trust him either.
Jeff had some impressive teeth. Even though he was laid-back and often slow-moving, he could move quickly when he wanted to. He had no front claws, but the ones on his back feet seemed perfectly sharp and fully operational.
Then something started to change.
Or maybe I started to change.
One evening I opened the door and walked into my place, and Jeff was sitting there.
The next evening, there he was again.
And the next.
Is this cat greeting me? I wondered.
Before long, I noticed something else. Shortly after I sat down on the couch at night, Jeff would appear.
That is where some friction began.
It turns out Jeff loves affection. A lot of affection. One of his favorite things is having his head rubbed and the area under his chin scratched.
The problem was that right after getting home was not necessarily when I was feeling particularly affectionate. I liked a little space. A few minutes to decompress. A chance to catch my bearings.
Jeff had other ideas.
There he was, front and center, ready to be scratched by a guy who was not especially interested in scratching anybody—particularly him.
I tried repeatedly to redirect him. I tried to “train” him to wait.
It didn’t work.
I will never be convinced that Jeff didn’t understand what I wanted. I think he understood perfectly well. He just wanted something different.
He wanted to be close to me.
Jeff was persistent.
Eventually I realized I was spending more energy trying to get Jeff to do things my way than it would take simply to meet him halfway.
Something changed.
After a while, I would look down from the television and discover Jeff stretched across my chest, close to my heart. Sometimes I had no recollection of him getting there. I hadn’t noticed his paws. I hadn’t noticed him moving into position.
Somehow, having Jeff there had become as natural as reaching for a drink of water. In fact, it was often when I reached for the water beside me that I noticed Jeff was there.
I had been wrong about this cat.
And as time went on, I discovered I had been wrong about a lot of things.
I have a bathroom connected to my bedroom, and I usually close the door while showering to keep out a draft. One morning I opened the door and looked down.
There was Jeff.
Something about it seemed familiar.
Wasn’t he sitting in exactly that spot yesterday?
I wasn’t sure, so I decided to pay attention the next morning.
There he was again.
Is he waiting for me?
Does he actually know my routine?
Surely this was coincidence. Dogs do things like this, I thought. Cats don’t. Not my cat.
But there Jeff was the next morning.
And the next.
As I write this, Jeff was stationed outside that same door this morning.
It didn’t stop there.
In the mornings I have a short devotional routine. I sit in the same chair most days. I began noticing that when I sat down, Jeff would settle a few feet away in almost exactly the same place.
Every morning.
Then one day I noticed something that surprised me even more.
Jeff was already sitting there before I arrived.
Was Jeff waiting for me before I had even sat down?
Was he waiting for me to come home in the evening?
Waiting for me to finish my shower?
Waiting for me during my morning devotions?
Waiting for company to leave so he could reclaim his place?
Apparently so.
I had been wrong about Jeff.
Most of all, I had never imagined I could feel such affection for a cat. I simply didn’t think relationships with animals worked that way. I had always had some difficulty understanding people who talked about how deeply they loved their pets.
It wasn’t part of my experience.
I had to experience it before I could understand it.
And somewhere along the way, I realized something humbling.
Jeff was teaching me.
He was teaching me about patience, persistence, attention, and love. He was also teaching me something about seeing value in another being even when that being has a hard time seeing it in himself.
I had entered our relationship with a collection of expectations and fixed ideas about how things were going to work.
Jeff apparently had not.
My expectations created walls.
Jeff didn’t seem to know the walls were there.
He never looked at me and concluded, “This guy looks stiff, unaffectionate, and probably boring. I think I’ll leave him alone.”
He just kept showing up.
Jeff tried to sit with me and was sometimes rejected.
Not now, Jeff.
Not a good time.
Later.
He kept coming back anyway.
Quietly, persistently, he worked on the walls I had built.
Jeff initiated the relationship.
Jeff paid attention.
Jeff learned my routines.
Jeff kept showing up.
And somewhere in all of that, perhaps I was simply the one who finally stopped running.
Jeff wanted his chin scratched. Unexpectedly, some of the crustier places around my own heart began to get scratched away too.
For much of my life, I carried similar misconceptions about other things.
One of them was God.
I always believed in God.
I just didn’t trust God very much.
If there was one person I was sure I couldn’t trust, it was God. Who knew what God might do? What might be taken away? What unpleasant lesson might be waiting around the corner?
When I fell into a hole in life, I rarely asked where God was.
I also never expected God to help me out of it—especially if I had dug the hole myself.
For many years, God and I seemed to have something like a gentleman’s agreement.
You stay over there.
I’ll stay over here.
You do your God things.
I’ll do mine.
No overlap.
No affection.
No expectations.
I was wrong about Jeff.
In sobriety, I have begun to wonder whether I was wrong about God too.
The Letter of James says, “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”
I used to hear words like that almost as a demand: move toward God, try harder, believe harder, do better.
I don’t hear them quite that way anymore.
What I have found in sobriety is that God abides with me in a powerful yet often unseen way. I struggle to put that into words because it is less something I can explain than something I experience.
And if a guy like me can experience it, I’m pretty sure anyone who wants it can experience it too.
Of course, part of me wishes I had begun to understand all of this earlier.
But earlier wasn’t my time.
I am simply grateful that I began to understand it at all.
Looking back, I don’t think the problem was that I wasn’t trying. In some ways, I may have been trying too hard—and insisting on doing it my way.
With Jeff, I did a few very simple things.
I brought him home.
I fed him.
I gave him shelter.
I bought him a toy or two.
And then Jeff did much of the rest.
Step by step, Jeff moved closer.
He kept showing up.
By the couch.
Outside the bathroom.
Near my chair in the morning.
Waiting until company leaves.
Waiting until I notice him.
Maybe my spiritual life has not been entirely different.
Perhaps God was present long before I became aware of that presence.
When I thought I was alone in the pits and holes of my life, maybe I wasn’t.
When I thought God was standing at arm’s length, perhaps God had been close all along. Maybe it was I who kept my distance—sometimes standing still, sometimes even moving away—while God kept showing up.
When I believed the relationship was fixed and distant, maybe the barrier existed mostly in me.
God, it turns out, was more flexible than I was.
I only needed to become a little more flexible myself.
This morning I sat in my usual chair.
Jeff was nearby.
Of course he was.
He keeps showing up.
And I am beginning to think God does too.