God Adopts Us

In Dallas one day a little bit of a kitten came to our door, bony and covered with fleas. My little daughter Elizabeth said, "Oh, isn’t he cute? Isn’t he cute, Mother? Oh, listen to him purr. Isn’t he cute? Oh, Mother, may I keep him?"

I heard her and said, "You don’t want a cat like that around here."

But she said, "Mother, let’s feed him."

I said again, "If you feed that cat, it will be under your feet the rest of the time."

But she begged, and Mrs. Rice could not refuse, so I said, "Well, if you are going to keep it, it ought to have some warm milk."

Elizabeth warmed the milk and put it in a saucer and gave it to the kitten. It got down and lapped up the milk and left its motor running all the time! Soon its little belly swelled out.

A day or two later when my wife started across the kitchen preparing the dinner, she stepped on the cat’s tail. It let out a "Meow!" She said, "That cat is underfoot all the time! I won’t have it in the house."

"Never mind," I said, "you have adopted a cat."

She would put it out, but it would go around to the front door, and somebody would open the door. As large a family as we had, we couldn’t keep all the doors shut all the time.

That cat had adopted us. That cat just stayed there, underfoot or not. It was our cat. It decided so the first saucer of milk it got.

Once I was a poor, flea-bitten, bony sinner. God gave me salvation and warmed my heart. Since then, He has had a cat on His hands–one He cannot get rid of! God cannot change. If He ever starts to turn me down when I ask Him to restore my joy or cleanse me again from sins I have confessed, I will say, "Lord, look at that verse! What about that? ‘With whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.’"