Kittenzen: Lost and Found

Mark came home the other day from his morning run and showed me a well-worn glitter ball (sans glitter) that had found its way into his running shoe. He said that he kept thinking as he was running that he had put the wrong insole into his shoes because it didn't feel quite right. When he got home and took off his shoe, he discovered the yellow smooshed glitter ball. The kittens seem to love hiding and then finding their toys in shoes. He found one of the kittens' spring toys in one of his boots yesterday and we watched one of them put it in his slipper a few minutes later. We then took a look in his other boots for a long lost green mouse that they love and voila! there it was scrunched into the toe of the boot. It has probably been there the last couple of times he wore them.

So they put a beloved toy in one of our shoes, effectively losing it, and then try with all their might to get it back out again. What kind of game is this? Why does it give them such pleasure to hide the toy and then (sometimes) find it again? Like little babies they really like the game of peekaboo, too, and hide and seek--I hide somewhere in the house and they come looking for me.

Now, we don't have nearly as much fun playing this game! Lost keys, hidden wallets, single socks, missing tools, AWOL this and that....We get out of sorts and irritated with each other. We have taken to praying about that which is lost, though, alleviating some of the irritation and distracting us for at least 90 seconds, the time it apparently takes for adrenalin to level off once it is activated. Not that we think God spends his time taking our things and hiding them for us to find or, indeed, finding them for us. But whenever life's circumstances begin to overwhelm us, be they large or small, we are reminded by the writers of the Bible that we are to turn to God with our anxieties, with our cares, with our raised levels of adrenalin. So we have decided to take these odd little opportunities to work on developing this habit.