God’s Blessings Are Sometimes People

If you live on planet earth, it’s almost impossible to avoid people. But sometimes that’s okay, because God’s blessings are sometimes people He puts in our lives. Such was the case for me when I met Lonnie Hull DuPont, an editor with Revell at the time I first met her. Lonnie passed away on August first, leaving the Christian writing community, as well as her family and friends, feeling a big loss. And yet her passing meant the end of her suffering from cancer.

In memory of her, I decided to share a story of mine that she published in a compilation called The Cat in the Christmas Tree: And Other True Stories of Feline Joy and Merry Mischief, published under the name Callie Smith Grant as editor. My interactions with her when I submitted my story titled Trouble for Christmas were encouraging and uplifting.

Normally I would insert a lot of subheadings into a post, to make the SEO manager happy. However, I decided that the best way to honor Lonnie is to post this story exactly as she published it in her compilation.

Trouble for Christmas

The note on the tiny kitten’s cage—Warning: Bites—failed to deter my son Benton. Which surprised me because bites from his first cat Tom sent him to the doctor for antibiotics. Twice.

“Just look at those giant ears. I think she’s the one.”

As an added incentive, they were having a sale on black cats so his Christmas money from G’ma and G’pa would cover the adoption fee. The adoption team helper carried the kitten—dubbed Rosie by her rescuers—into the visiting room. She scrambled lickety-split to the top cube of the cat tree and peered out glowing-yellow-eye to Benton’s steel-blue eye. When Benton turned to say something to me, the kitten waltzed onto his shoulder and perched, as if to say, “Mine.”

Benton refused to even meet any of the other kittens available at the adoption event. The warning sign, coupled with the wee one’s history, left me skeptical.

It seems Rosie had survived a horrendous trauma. A band of street dogs attacked and killed her feral mother and all her littermates in a small Eastern Oregon town. A young girl and her grandfather scooped her up and took her into their home before she suffered the same fate. They tried to raise her, but they weren’t cat people. They didn’t realize you can’t roughhouse with a kitten like you can a puppy and expect her to not bite whenever she felt like it. At three months old, they turned the now crazy kitten over to the local cat rescue organization.

“Let’s maybe see some of the other kittens.”

“But she picked me and she needs me,” Benton insisted.

At home, the new kitten took one look at our cockapoo Roman and growled and hissed at him. The first night, we kept them separated with the kitten locked in Benton’s room. It took a few days for them to negotiate a truce.

The first visit to the vet we learned that Rosie was an inappropriate name for our new male kitten. After considering a number of options, Benton settled on Alucard, the name of one of his favorite anime characters. With his new name came a new attitude. Although Roman still thought he was top dog, Alucard now strutted around the house like he owned the place. . . and everything in it.

How many small items can one kitten steal from the top of a dresser? As many as you leave there. In the first month, I caught Alucard batting around a small decorative tile with a cross on it, which he carried from my bedroom to the kitchen tile. The next week, I discovered a small oval box open and empty on my bedroom floor. The pearl necklace that should have been in it was gone. I found it where he left it under the dining room table. I finally cleared the little things off my dresser and stored them safely in a drawer.

He didn’t only carry things off to play with. He also knocked bigger things off my bookcase. Things I thought were safely at the back of the shelf and too high up for him to get to.

A Willow Tree angel became one of the worst casualties of his antics. Her name is Hope and she carries a lantern to bring light. The dangling lantern proved too tempting for a curious kitten.

I discovered the body first, lying on the floor in front of the bookcase. I scanned the room for her head and found it behind a chair. The lantern—Alucard’s prize for his efforts—required a wider search. He carried it to Benton’s room at the other end of the house. Thanks to a clean break and a little super glue, Benton restored Hope to her former angelic glory.

After that, I took to calling him Trouble, which rolled off the tongue better than Alucard anyway. When he chewed the spine of my small red-leather New Testament with Psalms and Proverbs I’d just about had enough. Friends with cats assured me he would grow out of it, but I had my doubts.

If he was trouble indoors, he was double trouble when allowed outside. At five months old, we started letting Trouble—I mean Alucard—roam our backyard. His tendency to seek out the highest places in the house—like the tops of open doors or my antique wardrobe—perhaps should have caused us to be more cautious. He really did need close supervision.

One day Benton called me at work. “Alucard climbed a tree and he won’t come down.”

Benton left Alucard in the backyard thinking the fence would contain him, then gone back inside to get a snack. When he returned to the deck, ham sandwich in hand, he heard a desperate meowing. He searched all around the yard but didn’t see the kitten anywhere. Following the sound, he finally spotted Alucard 30 feet up a fir tree on the other side of our back fence.

By the time I got home, Alucard had climbed 10 feet higher. It seemed unlikely his next move would bring him closer to the ground. I did what years of television taught me: I called the fire department. Surely, they would come, sirens blaring, and use their aerial ladder to rescue him. But it turns out that’s only on TV. Instead, the dispatcher offered the phone number of a local arborist who rescued cats from trees as a sideline.

The cat rescuer came right away. For the minimal fee of $75, he climbed the tree using his state-of-the-art harness and rope system. I thought for sure Alucard would bolt even higher up the tree, but I was wrong. When the tree guy reached the branch where Alucard stood mewling nonstop, the kitten dashed right to him and gave nary a struggle as he popped him into a sack.

Alucard undertook three more tree-climbing escapades that first summer. The last turned into an overnighter. He snuck out the back door right before we left to attend a wedding three hours away. We got home late. Benton thought he was in our room and we thought he was in Benton’s. We were all wrong.

We called the rescue guy—again—early Sunday morning. I suggested he should offer us a frequent customer discount. He disagreed.

We relegated Alucard to indoors only after that. Our mischievous kitten grew into a panther-like cat with a twelve-inch tail that he carried like a question mark. The question being what trouble was he sauntering away from this time.

Alucard mellowed as he reached a year old. With the coming of cooler fall weather, he morphed into a lap cat. Much to my dismay, my lap became a favorite napping spot.

With the holidays around the corner, we talked about how to deal with our tree-climbing fool. I voted against putting up our artificial Christmas tree, worried the dangling ornaments would tempt Alucard to resume his troublesome ways. I did not want to recreate one of the many internet videos of cats climbing to the top of a Christmas tree. Benton and my husband Randy outvoted me. As a compromise, I insisted no one hang any breakable ornaments on the lower branches.

I also had to figure out what to do with all my nativity sets. They weren’t necessarily expensive, but some had great sentimental value, like the ceramic set my mother-in-law made the year my husband was born. I dreaded a king or shepherd suffering the same fate as my Willow Tree angel. To be safe, I place breakable sets as far beyond his reach as I could put them. I set out an olivewood set from Israel on the low table behind the couch.

I was right, of course. The first night Alucard batted a wooden angel from a bottom branch. Then he lay down on the fluffy red tree skirt next to his prize and took a nap. I had to take a picture to capture the sheer adorableness.

Finding the olive wood baby Jesus on the floor the next day? Not so adorable. But at least it wasn’t the ceramic one.

One evening in early December, I snuggled under a warm blanket in my recliner reading a book. Randy worked on thank you notes for his postal customers who left him a Christmas gratuity. He used a pre-printed sentiment he found years before and copied it onto blank thank you note cards.

I looked up from my book when I heard something clatter to the floor in the spare bedroom where we kept the printer. “Randy, you can’t leave the door to that room open. The cat just knocked something over in there,” I remarked.

He went to investigate. “There’s no cat in here,” he reported.

Hearing the commotion, Benton emerged from his bedroom. “What’s going on?”

“Your dad left the spare room open and your cat just knocked something over.”

As he entered the living room, Benton laughed. “Mom, Alucard is on your lap.”

Oh, so he was, fast asleep and causing no trouble at all. “Well to be fair,” I replied, “he’s usually Trouble.”

God’s Blessings Can Be Disguised as Trouble

I loved getting to share this funny true story with Lonnie and the readers of her compilation. It was a reminder to me that God’s blessings can take all shapes. They can be in the form of a lovely editor or a troublesome cat.

Closing Prayer for God’s Blessings

Heavenly Father, I pray for all who are mourning the loss of Lonnie Hull DuPont. May You bless them with comfort and peace, trusting that she is now with You and no longer suffering with cancer. May You also open the eyes of all who read this to see the blessings You have provided in this life, whether those blessings be a person, a cat, or something else. In Jesus’s name, amen.

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