Gratuitous Cat Post #4

This is Lulu, who is one of the most awesome felines ever to walk on four legs. She's also a very gentle critter, unless you happen to be a chipmunk or a mole or some other small rodent who lives in our neighborhood. She's got just enough of her predator instinct to be bad news for those guys. But hey, we live in a fallen world.

If you haven't ever done so, check out John Wesley's sermon, "The General Deliverance." It has a beautiful expression of hope for the final redemption of all God's creatures.

Cats included, of course.

[Update on 11/5/09: CNN is reporting the first cat to have contracted the H1N1 flu virus. See this link for the story.]

Friday miscellanies

A few notes of interest on this Friday:

-- I didn't know about the GAFCON meeting in Jerusalem, made up of conservative Anglican bishops, until a friend told me about it at a wedding reception last weekend. GAFCON stands for Global Anglican Future Conference, and it is being attended by a lot of African bishops who will not attend the upcoming, once-per-decade Lambeth Conference later this year. (The New York Times has an informative article about it here.) I will be curious to read about what influence GAFCON will have on Lambeth later this year, but I cannot imagine that such a meeting is going for the long-term unity of the Anglican Communion. Even if schism is not what they are intending, holding such a large gathering in the way that they are certainly has schismatic overtones. Daniel McClain Hixon has started blogging about GAFCON, so check in on his Gloria Deo blog in the coming days to see what he has to say about it.

-- Luke Wetzel at the It's a Mad Mission ... Sign Me Up blog alerted me to Adam Hamilton's new project of planning to visit every Annual Conference in order to do training sessions in leadership, preaching, and evangelism over the next six or seven years. Adam tells about the plan on his own blog in this post. For those of you who don't know, Adam is the pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, one of the largest churches in the entire connection. (You can read his bio at the church's website here.) He is a great pastor within the UMC, and I think he does as good a job as anyone at showing how megachurches can be a positive force in the larger church. He's also written a number of books that have been influential over the past few years. This new project is one of the most interesting things I've ever seen him attempt, in that he is essentially seeking to exercise the teaching office connection-wide - a role that has historically been reserved for bishops. (Luke Wetzel deals with this issue explicitly in his blog post, pointing out that Adam's references to Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke suggest that his desire to exercise a general superintendency over the church is evident.) This could clearly be controversial. Regardless, I'm glad he's doing it and I hope every Annual Conference will invite him to attend. Our actual bishops do wonderful ministry, but by and large the structure of the church is such that they have to spend almost all their time administrating and very little time actually teaching. Perhaps Adam can offer a different model of episcopal leadership that will open up new possibilities for us. That alone would be sufficient fruit of his new project, but I suspect it will do a lot more good than just that.

-- That sleepy-looking cat over on the right-hand side of this post is Lulu. She may be one of the gentlest, most docile creatures God has ever put on this earth. But Emily and I have discovered something new and quite shocking about her in the past few weeks: She is a holy terror on the mole population of our backyard. Since the weather has started really getting warm, we haven't had a week go by without Lulu dispatching a mole or two. Since she has been raised by people from her kittenhood, she has no idea what to do with them once she kills them. But the ancient wildcat instinct she carries around deep inside of her is plenty to cause her to dispense justice on the little critters when she can get her paws on them. The upside: We have no more mole tracks in our yard. So I guess she's finally earning her Cat Chow.

Gratuitous Cat Post

I tend to shy away from personal posts on this blog. I like reading personal posts on other people's blogs, but that isn't why I created Gen X Rising.

Then, of course, there's my cats. The Typist over at Dogblogger allows her dog to have an entire blog to itself. And John the Methodist at Locusts and Honey has long chronicled the daily habits of his rabbits.

So I figure Lulu and Ruthie deserve at least one decent post. My apologies in advance. And thanks for the indulgence.

When Emily and I married, we were both single parents raising feline children. So there was a certain Brady Bunch quality to the whole thing. I had Ruth, a tempermental and skittish gray tabby. And Emily had Lulu, who sometimes acts so sedated that we are afraid she's secretly addicted to tranquilizers. (Side story: When we moved to North Carolina, we got some actual kitty tranquilizers from a vet friend of ours. We figured 12 hours in the car would be tough on them. So we put the pills in the middle of a delicious meal of Fancy Feast, per our vet's instructions. Ruthie ate all around her pill without touching it, and then got extremely agitated when we tried to force it down her throat; Lulu dutifully gobbled hers up and spent the next 9 or 10 hours in a coma.)


So that's Lulu above. I love this picture because it looks like the Holy Spirit is being poured out directly onto her. (And hey, who's to say that it isn't??) She is a serene animal. For you Myers-Briggs types, she is whatever combination of letters equals "calm, agreeable, friendly, and generally takes life as it comes."


Then there's Ruth. Unlike Lulu, Ruthie spent her first few months on the streets. I rescued her back in 2003, but she's never been able to fully shake the feral nature that her early kittenhood gave her. She's a great cat, but she spends a lot more time outdoors (and she has a disturbing tendency to kill small animals like birds and moles and then leave them on our back doorstep). She's a good cat too, but she plays by her own rules. Lulu would never think of spending the night anywhere other than at the foot of our bed; Ruthie, on the other hand, often spends all night wandering the neighborhood.

In the picture above, Ruthie has managed to get herself up on the roof of our garage and is trying to figure out a way down. Typical.

Ok, so I feel better now. Thanks.