Don’t act like my cat
You can’t love a world you’re afraid of
By Joshua Bower
A lot of Christians share a certain behavior with my family’s cat. But if the church is going to love our world with the love of Jesus, this has to change.
I’ve never wanted a cat. However, my 6-year-old daughter badgered my wife and me until we got one. We broke down when, after gifting her with a stuffed animal instead of a real cat for the third time, we overheard her sobbing in her bedroom: “I just want to love a real alive cat!” So last December I went to a local veterinarian’s office, adopted a scrawny black cat nobody else wanted, and on Christmas morning Santa delivered the cat to my daughter. She named him “Black Beauty.”
Check out his photo below. Isn’t he adorable? I thought so, too, until he scratched up our stuff (notice the nail caps he now wears), got a wicked case of worms that led to some lovely litter box cleanup, started flipping his water bowl over on our floor, and routinely attacked my ankles. But none of those are the behavior he and many Christians share.
So what behavior am I talking about? Freaking out. The cat freaks out. About everything. I always knew cats were skittish, but to say he’s high-strung is a gross understatement. Every noise, every sudden movement, every time the lights go on or off, he ducks down and scans the horizon like he’s about to be attacked. Black Beauty is literally afraid of his entire world. He’s been in our house for 10 of the 11 months of his life, sees everyone in our family every day, and never receives anything but love and affection from all of us. And yet, he perceives everything around him as a threat. Good things surround him, but he’s always anxious, always afraid, always on the defensive.
Christians freak out, too. We freak out over institutional survival: “We’ll never have enough money,” “We’ll never have enough members,” etc. We could talk forever on those fears alone, but when I say Christians act like my cat, I’m thinking about how we fear the world around us. Last week I was in a meeting where, when asked what makes them anxious about the world, one-third of people said, “terrorism.”
One person even said he’s 
afraid to turn on the TV in the morning because there might be news about another terrorist attack. Terrorism is legitimately scary, especially after what happened in New York and less than two weeks removed from remembering the 15th anniversary of the September 11th attacks.
But the truth is that Americans have only about a 1 in 20 million chance of being killed in a terrorist attack. You face roughly the same odds that your furniture will crush you to death. Better watch out for that musty old couch somebody donated to the church when it got too ugly for their own living room!
Last month my wife and I sat through a meeting where one man repeatedly offered his opinion on the decaying moral standards of American culture. He summed up his remarks with this statement: “Luckily I won’t be around long enough to see it get too much worse.” He was an older gentleman, and he actually told the group he felt lucky to be so old, so that he could die and escape this depraved world. I told my wife when we got home, “I had no idea I was supposed to be so afraid of the world!”
Every day I hear Christians decrying the world outside the church and lamenting how things “have never been this bad.” Like my cat, they’re on the defensive. But Black Beauty has an excuse: it’s instinct. He can’t control his reactions. He doesn’t know any better. But what’s our excuse? We gather week in and week out to give praise and glory to the God we say created the universe from scratch. We say this God loves us and looks out for us and cares for us. We say our Savior’s life, death, and resurrection reconciled us and the entire creation to God, and set the world on the path to final restoration, and opened the way to eternal life with God. We say even death itself cannot defeat our Lord. So why does fear drive us? Why do we so often perceive what’s going on around us as a threat?
How have you experienced unfounded fear in your church? Where have you seen Christians giving in to fears that are simply irrational? More importantly, how have you seen people move from fear to courage? We have to be able to answer that last question, because we will never be able to love the world with the love of Jesus if we’re afraid of it.
To tell you the truth, I really like the world we live in, and I see God working all over the place in exciting new ways all the time. I see God working in music, television, movies, on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, in politics, in debates about standing for the national anthem, in discussions about race…everywhere.
But why do so many other Christians seem to see nothing but threats where I see hope? How can we shift from fear to courage, cynicism to hope, so that we can fully love the world Jesus lived and died for so that everyone in that world might fully love him? Ask that question at your church, and among fellow Christians wherever you go. Let me know what you come up with.