mgpcpastor's blog

Another article for the local paper.

How could a woman end up living with 1,100 cats on a twelve-acre secure reserve? Lynea Lattanzio’s cat refuge has a 1.6 million dollar a year turnover with costs for food and other cat related needs. This is not about cat hoarding, though. Lattanzio and her staff/volunteers seek to re-home as many of the cats under their care as they can.
How does someone end up living with 1,100 cats?
It all started in 1992 when Lattanzio’s father asked her to help him find some cats and she brought home fifteen kittens. Since then some 28,000 cats have spent time under her care.
Many of us find ourselves in situations we never really intended to be in.
Sometimes we’re in circumstances that we were determined we’d never be in.
It’s hard to think of every possible future consequence of every present decision that we make.
If we tried we’d probably find ourselves paralysed with indecision and fear.
But generally whenever we find ourselves in circumstances where we ask ourselves ‘How did I come to this?’ all we have to do is back-track through our lives to one particular decision or circumstance.
Sometimes we lack the self-awareness to do that and trusted friends can help us piece the puzzle together. But we’re where we are because that’s the direction we’ve been going.
It’s unusual for our circumstances to be the entire result of situations out of our control or because of the actions of others. That can happen, but for most of us our situations are the result of choices we’ve made.
The benefit of knowing that, and particularly knowing what the particular choices are that have had specific outcome in our lives, is to enable us to know we have the capacity to direct our lives through wiser and wiser choices.
We’ve probably all been in situations where we feel similar troubling situations in life or relationships keep happening to us. It’s beneficial to learn if any of our choices are contributing to what we may otherwise feel is just bad luck.
Christians have a relationship with God because of Jesus. Because of Jesus we belong to God’s family. But being part of God’s family doesn’t mean that life is perfect. There are many blessings, but we are still responsible to bear the consequences of our decisions in life. The instruction of the Bible and counsel of other Christians are vital to help us in making better choices.
In Jesus God offers us a chance to account for our errors and look forward to a future where past patterns of behaviour no longer define our present reality. A new season of decisions can promise a future of more fruitful relationships and outcomes.
If you feel you’re in a place and you have no idea how you got there, or what the way out is, there’s hope.
There may even be cats.