Prayer for a Kitten

By: Dave Fiedler

When I was in third grade, our old cat, Phi, died. As a replacement, we went to the pound and I got to pick out a new model. I got a little seal-point Siamese kitten that was all creamy white, except for a tip of black on both ears, all four feet, and his (her?) tail.

About a week or two later, a friend from school came home with me for the afternoon. When his mom came to pick him up, my kitten evidently laid down right in front of the car's right rear tire. When she drove away, of course, she drove right over him and he died. I was pretty upset, and went walking up our beautiful, tree-covered driveway to our mail box a quarter mile away. When I go there, I didn't want to go out on the main road (even though we were at the end of the road and there was never any traffic), so I stood by the mailbox and cried for several minutes.

Then I remembered my memory verse from the Sabbath before: "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted." Well, I'd heard about prayer of course, but I'd never really had anything to pray about for myself before. But this seemed like such an open and shut case that I didn't see how God could possibly evade the issue. The verse said that those who mourned would be comforted; I was mourning; how obvious could a situation get? So I told God that I was mourning, and that I remembered my memory verse (had to be some merit in that, didn't there?), and that I figured it was His job to get going on the comforting part.

I don't remember if I was respectful or not. I do remember that I was very clear that His reputation was on the line.

So I walked back home, checked to see if the cat had been resurrected (no, it hadn't), got a shovel and buried him, and then waited. Nothing happened.

The next day, I went to school, and walked back home from the bus stop, which took me past our mailbox, of course. I reminded God that He had an unfulfilled responsibility, but I suspect I was already giving up on the prospect.

A while after I got home, a car came driving down our driveway. This was pretty unusual, so I went out to greet it. As I approached the driver's window, a man rolled it down and asked if we had lost a cat. He had found one, and had checked already with the neighbors (half a mile away) but it wasn't theirs. I told him that, no, we hadn't lost a cat, but that my kitten had been run over the day before. He reached over to the front passenger's seat and picked up a large brown paper grocery bag that was rolled down about two-thirds of the way.

He said, "Well, no one else has claimed this, so why don't you take it," and handed the bag out the window to me. Then, without waiting, he drove away. By the time I got the top of the bag unrolled, he was effectively gone up the driveway. But inside the bag was a little seal-point Siamese kitten that was all creamy white, except for a tip of black on both ears, all four feet, and his (her?) tail.

I never went back and dug up the first one to compare, but they were for all intents and purposes identical.

That was the first time I had ever had a prayer of my own answered, and it was an important influence for years to come.