Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee (Isaiah 49:15, KJV).
In the summer of 2003, we went away for a week’s holiday. When we left, our cat Frizzle was very pregnant; when we returned it was apparent by her figure that she had given birth. Yet we could find no evidence of the kittens, nor did she appear to be nursing. We concluded that they had all died or been eaten by a coyote.
Whatever had happened, Frizzle was not accepting it easily. She kept meowing at me, trying to communicate her distress. That was Friday. Saturday I suggested to 12-year-old Rachel, who had searched high and low to no avail and who was almost as distraught as Frizzle at the absence of kittens, that we should consider getting another kitten to help the unhappy momma deal with her engorged milk supply—and her bereavement.
Sunday morning I was awakened early by Frizzle yowling below our window, two floors down. (She knew which room was mine.) I got Rachel up and suggested that we drive to the farm where we get our eggs. They always have more kittens around than they want. I sent her out to fire up the Suburban. She was back in a moment, keys still in hand and very excited.
“Mom, I can hear kittens mewing somewhere, really faintly!”
Our house was in the process of being stuccoed. The men had left an old pick-up truck, the box piled with some supplies and a lot of refuse, parked in our yard over the weekend. It was in the back of that truck that we located the source of the mewing. I removed armfuls of empty mortar bags and stucco wire, and there I found two tiny kittens.
And here was the extraordinary thing: They were bound, face to face, to one another. They’d each had a long, trailing umbilical cord, which had become entangled with the other’s, along with a piece of stucco wire and some long bits of grass and string. The wire, a strand about ten inches long with cross members every few inches, was between them, and it ran right through the centre of the tangle between their bellies. They had tumbled around and around in their efforts to get free, in the process cranking that knot tighter and tighter, pulling themselves into a dying embrace. They could not have reached any nourishment from their mother the way they were caught, and it is a wonder that they were still alive.
I lifted them gently out and sent Rachel running for wire cutters and my sharp sewing scissors. She also came back with Frizzle, who, upon seeing that I was rescuing her kittens, nearly came unglued with gratitude and joy. She crawled all over me, my busy hands, and her babies until I couldn’t do the careful operation and had to ask Rachel to hold her tight while I worked at the tangled mess.
The kittens both survived and thrived, and fittingly, one of them found a home with the granddaughter and great-granddaughter of the head of stuccoing company. And Frizzle and I had another bit of history that made me special to her and her to me. (Sadly, she died three months later.)
Although Frizzle was just a simple little beast, her maternal instinct was strong. She was pathetically concerned for the survival of her off-spring, devoted to their well-being. If so a little, half-sized cat, how much more a human mother? And, as the scripture above asks us, if so a human mother, how much more God?
When God’s people feel forgotten and forsaken, in need of comfort and mercy (Isaiah 49:13-14), God reassures them: Even if a mother should forget her own child, “Yet will I not forget thee” (v.15).
When we are lost and bound in captivity, unable to turn to God ourselves to find the sustenance we need, He will raise up intercessors to cry out faithfully on our behalf. He will send someone to seek us out where we lie, rendered helpless by our difficulties. Just like the scene outside Lazarus’ tomb, He will command that one: “Loose him.” The trappings of death will be disentangled and removed.
After all, that is God’s desire—and Jesus’ mandate:
To proclaim liberty to the captives (Isaiah 61:1).
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