Adorable Kitten Needs New Home: Litter Trained, Has Had Shots, Loves to Drink Milk

“We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn. In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.” (Hebrews 5:11-14)

Maybe you already know the saga of the cats at our house.

In case you don’t, let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, a scraggly mother cat was cared for her young kitten in our neighborhood. Food was scarce, and forced to scavenge she often dug in our trash cans and killed birds on our lawn.

(The rest of) my family felt compassion and began to put out food for them. The cats filled their belly with fresh cat chow.

Soon the cold winds of winter began to blow. And the cats needed a place to stay. The boys crafted a shelter in the garage with comfortable beds and warm blankets. The cats were content to call it their home. (Something that was often lost in the freqent hissing.)

As they became more familiar they got their own names, just like part of the family. There was Mommy Kitty, and Baby Kitty. Clever, I know.

Soon, we noticed other felines staying at the shelter. We presumed it was Daddy Kitty, often accompanied by a cat we called The New Girlfriend. And on particularly cold nights, Daddy Kitty would bring along some others known as The Drinking Buddies.

Our garage was completely taken over by a dysfunctional cat family seeking food and warmth.

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Once spring came, it was time for the cats to move on. And once their food supply diminished, they went their way.

We haven’t seen Baby Kitty in months.

But Mommy Kitty still passes by now and then, looking a bit battle weary again.

Perhaps she catches a glimpse in the window of a small kitten that looks . . .  just like her.

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Her name is Sanchez. She was abandoned, apparently by a Mommy Kitty, in a neighbor’s garage. For some reason, the neighbor thought we might like to have her. After all, she’d seen some cats going into our garage.

When Sanchez came over, she might have been three weeks old. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t really see. She couldn’t walk very well without falling down. She didn’t meow much. She mostly just screamed.

And she drank milk from a tiny bottle that Lane patiently fed to her numerous times each day.

She stopped screaming, started growing and finally learned to drink from a bowl. Instead of being off balance and falling down all the time, she runs and climbs and pounces on anything that moves.

As you might expect, despite the short-term transitional housing we intended for her, now she runs the house.*

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She had her first visit to the vet yesterday. She had some new experiences involving needles and thermometers that reminded her that life at our house is really pretty good. But the vet told us it was time for her to stop drinking just milk.

She needs to grow bigger and stronger. She’s holding herself back with the formula.

We’ve already been trying to move her to solid food for a long time. But she will have nothing to do with it. She likes her milk replacer. She even prefers a certain brand. The others make her sneeze.

She has no intention of giving it up.

But she has to.

She can’t grow strong and mature if she just keeps drinking Perci-Lac.

So in a couple of days, she will go cold turkey. Or cold cat food, perhaps. She will have to decide to eat solid food or not eat at all.

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The writer of Hebrews encourages us with respect to our maturity. We need to be growing. We need to eat solid food.

We like the formula. It’s comforting.

We stick with the basics. But God wants to take us further than that. He has much more planned for us. We need to move past the very basics of our faith, dig deep into the Word, and let it do its work in us.

To grow us and mature us.

“Solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves” to understand right and wrong, to understand God’s will and plan for us, to understand obedience. We train ourselves in maturity by constant use of the Word.

By constantly allowing God free reign in us to teach us and try us and test us.

Just above these verses, we are reminded that Jesus learned obedience through suffering. We learn obedience by constantly submitting ourselves to God’s direction, which may mean we experience difficulty at times, deal with pain at times, face great hardship at times. But by craving the solid food instead of just milk, we begin to grow strong. We begin to thrive. 

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Sanchez is about to face some hardship. Some painful times. She’s going to have to learn the hard way how to eat solid food.

When it’s done, she’ll be a healthier cat, and she’ll begin to mature.

But it won’t be easy.

She’ll have to give up the milk.

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*This adorable kitten can be yours to take home today. Please contact me for details.