The Impossibility of Human Reason

I don't feel good today. My head hurts for the second straight day. My sinuses are on fire, especially the left one. I haven't worked-out since Sunday, and I'm feeling sluggish. In general, I'm simply exhausted after a very busy summer. I'm having one of those days, and when I allow myself to stop and have one of those days, I crash, and today I'm crashing.

I took my boys to the animal shelter yesterday to pick out two kittens. I saw a huge, pudgy adult cat sitting in the middle of his cage in an owl-like posture. His only motion was the slow turning of his head as he glanced around. He wore a collar - he had been someone's. He wasn't excited. He wasn't pitiful. He was just unaffected. His future was likely not promising - consisting of days or hours or maybe even minutes for all I knew.

It's strange to me that God created cats in such a way that they produce an entire litter of kittens. Creatures that depend on man for survival, and yet two cats in their natural form produce many more offspring than two humans - certainly more than those two humans can care for. And the result is a massive number of animal shelters overflowing with precious furry companions, most just waiting as the clock ticks down to lethal injection time. Their charge: there is simply no room for them in this world - which makes me question why God put them here in the first place.

The somber experience of looking into the eyes of so many that would suffer this fate turned the experience of saving two sweet kitties bittersweet - I couldn't do anything for the hundred remaining, and even if I could have there would have been another hundred right behind them.

I'd like to reason all of this out spiritually, but I spend so much time writing from the spiritual perspective, I sometimes forget about the human side. And I think I forget about the human side because sometimes it simply isn't possible to reason from the human side. If I can just assign spiritual reasoning to the pain of humanity, it makes it all bearable. Ninety-five percent of the time, that is what I seek to do, but today I find myself pleading, "Jesus, please come get us today - I'm just so darn tired."

*The two we saved pictured above (the tortiose shell is Jazzy Gogo, and the gray striped and white is Ginger)