Do Angels Have Fur?

Did you ever have something in your life that defied explanation? This is one of those events in my life.

My wife and I were married in July of 1971. After a short time in Michigan where I still had one course to finish my MBA, we moved to Connecticut where I would be starting work about a month later. We lived with my parents for a couple of months until I could earn enough money to make a down payment on our own place (we were both VERY poor college students, having paid for our own college education). While there we adopted an older kitten. Shortly after Christmas we moved into a rented house in Prospect.

We were not planning on having children for a few years and at this time we only had one car, so my wife was “marooned” at home all day long. The cat was very loved, especially by my wife. We initially thought it was a girl, and its name was Susie, but we later found out that it was a boy. But that was okay, since Johnny Cash had released a song titled “A Boy Named Sue” just a few years earlier. We both grew to love Susie.

Fast forward a couple of years and Susie started becoming sick. We took him to the vet in Cheshire where we left him overnight for observation and testing. The next day we received the diagnosis – our cat had become ill with feline infectious anemia. Without some major expenditure (periodic blood transfusions), with funds we did not have, the prognosis was not good. We made the difficult decision to have him put to sleep so he would not suffer any further.

It was now after dark, and we needed some time to grieve our loss. We pulled into the parking lot of a church where we could do so. We parked right in the middle of the dark parking lot – away from the building and away from any of the houses or other businesses that surrounded it. I turned the car off and we just sat there in the dark – both of us sobbing over having lost our first pet. For those who have pets who seem like they are members of your family, you can appreciate how we felt.

Because the temperature was pretty mild and we didn’t want to steam up the windows, we rolled down the windows on both sides of the car. We weren’t sure how we were going to get through this tragic event in our lives.

Suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, a cat jumped through the passenger window and onto my wife’s lap! It began purring and nuzzling up to us. What was going on?! We could see no reasonable explanation for this startling event. We returned the cat’s affection and as we did so, we both began to calm down. After a few minutes, and just as quickly as it came into the car, the cat leaped back out of the window and disappeared into the dark.

We were both stunned! How was it possible that as we sat their grieving the loss of our cat, that another cat had miraculously appeared to give us such comfort? We could come up with no plausible explanation other than that this cat was an angel in disguise.

That event happened nearly 45 years ago, but we can both remember it as though it was yesterday. God chooses different ways to talk to people. In our case, it was through one of his messengers – an angel dressed in fur, with triangle ears and a long tail!