Selective hearing..?

Kylie, Teddi and Tibo

I have lived with border collies. That's like living with a couple of intelligent pre-schoolers in your home. You can speak to a border collie the way you'd speak to a three or four year old child, and be fairly confident that she'll understand what you're saying and do what you ask. Every border collie owner loves to entertain you (bore you!!) with stories of something clever their dog did when he overhead people speaking and understood what was being said.

Living with cats, therefore, has been quite an adjustment. I'm not going to join the debate about whether cats are as intelligent as dogs; I'll just say that my cats seem to have selective hearing. Even though we know that they're bilingual (they understand the word, "Ven," just as much as the word, "Come.") and each one of them knows their own name, we have absolutely no guarantee that they will cooperate and that they'll actually come when we call, "Come, Tobi," or "Ven, Tamba."  Call out the word, "Food," on the other hand, and they'll be there in a flash, with big Teddi leading the way and miaowing loudly.

On Sunday, after church, we were sitting in the living room and Teddi was snuggling on my lap. Jokingly, I said to him, "I hope you realise what a lucky boy you are. If we hadn't rescued your mother, you could have been born and be living in the street!" Suddenly Teddi leapt up and began rubbing against me, purring loudly and enthusiastically. We looked at each other in surprise: surely he couldn't have understood what had just been said. And then we all began to laugh as we realised what had happened. Teddi had heard the word, "street" and had associated it with his favourite word: "treat" - those long thin cat treats that you can buy in supermarkets. I don't know what's in them (liver and other meats, I suspect) but I've never met a cat that wasn't crazy about them. (See Tibo above, when my parents brought some cat treats to South Africa.) Teddi's sudden display of affection wasn't that he was showing his appreciation for being rescued from a life of homelessness; it was simply his usual excitement at the prospect of being given one of those treats.

In our walk with God, it's so easy for us to have "selective hearing" too: we hear the parts in the Bible that talk about God giving us peace and joy and answering our prayers.... but we ignore the parts that talk about how our faith will be made stronger through suffering, or where Jesus tells us that following God will often be costly and require us to make sacrifices. Sometimes we're as self-seeking as those cats of mine, focusing more on our own needs and wants than on what will be of eternal value in the kingdom of God.

I love my cats but, spiritually speaking, I'd rather be like a border collie - with their longing to please and their attitude of enthusiastic obedience - than like a cat with selective hearing!