The Cat Creator

O Lord, our Lord, how excellent in Your name in all the earth.

Psalm 8:1

All things bright and beautiful, all creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful - the Lord God made them all.

-Cecil F. Alexander

I love cats.  Big cats, little cats, tame cats, wild cats - there is nothing in the world quite so beautiful as a cat.  All cats have flexible bodies, quick reflexes, sharp retractable claws, and teeth for killing small (or large) prey.  Not only can cats hear sounds too faint for human ears, they can also hear sounds higher in frequency than humans can perceive.  Cats are adept at both seeing in near darkness and (almost) always landing on their feet.

My first cat as a child was an un-fixed baby machine named Susie.  I have no idea how many batches of kittens she had when I was a kid, but there were a lot of them.  I have shared a home with a giant cat named Chubbs, a female cat named George, a very large, tiger striped orange male named Boopie, and a particularly talkative Siamese who refused to stay out of the baby's cradle and had to be given to a new family.  I currently have a black and white cat named Sapphire.  She is just a run-of-the-mill mixed breed, but there has to be some Siamese in there somewhere, because she talks and talks and talks.

The cat in the photograph above is a darling tiger who lives on Tiger Mountain in the Bronx Zoo in New York.  There were six or seven tigers lazing around on the day I visited, but this fellow decided he had slept enough and between splashing/swimming/nose diving in the pond and harrassing his dozing buddies, he put on a real show for everyone on the other side of the glass.  Obviously his calm demeanor belied his ferocious nature, and I was very glad for the protective glass that kept him on his side of the pond.

God's creation always amazes me - not only for its beauty, but for its color and variety.  God could have made just one species of cat, but instead, he filled the earth with lions, tigers, cheetahs, lynx, leopards, cougars, ocelots, bobcats, and jaguars, to name a few.  I love my little house cat, but I look forward to the day when the heavens and the earth will be recreated, and I won't need a piece of safety glass protecting me from those beautiful big cats.