I’ve always wanted to have a dog. As a kid, I would write letters to Santa year after year imploring him to leave a puppy for me on Christmas morning. He never did, and after several years, I stopped expecting him to. But I still asked. Now that I am an adult, it is in my fullest capability to become a dog owner. I have the resources, the space, the power over my destiny to make my childhood dream come true.

But I don’t own a dog because he hasn’t found me yet.

On the other hand, I have been found my many cats. And this, my dear reader, is what the guiding principle in my life of pets has always been – I have always been found by a pet. They have always just walked into my life, and that is how I know that they are meant to be in my life.

My first cat, a black temperamental cat we called Olby, was a stray who wandered into our yard in Pensacola, Florida after my mom prayed with my sister and I that a witch would send us a black cat. (That’s another topic for a more theological time, but that’s how the story goes). My second cat, a white docile Persian cat named MiMi, was the foil to Olby and came to our family when his owner decided to give him up.

And while it might be debatable whether or not my third cat, Xiao Hei, came to me or was procured by me, there is no doubt in my mind that the hand of Providence guided him into our home. Technically, he walked up to a friend and I in a friendly manner one hot muggy day in the summer outside of the college campus where we were taking summer classes. In fact, he was so friendly, that we were compelled to try and rescue him from the animal traps that we had seen placed in the parking lot where he greeted us. Perhaps you might think the main point of my essay controversial if I told you that we ended up picking him up and throwing him in the back of my parents’ minivan that day, rescuing him from a potential extermination by the city animal control. Scoff not, but hear out the rest of my story.

As friendly as he was to us on his territory, his sudden abduction into a nauseating fast moving vehicle changed his temperament. After we parked the minivan into the garage, he became very frightened and ran out the door to hide within the mess of stuff in the garage. After no avail to coax him out, it was someone’s brilliant idea to open the garage door. Of course he ran out in a streak of tabby stripes, and of course we could not follow his high speed flight of fear. We looked for several hours, asking neighbours if they had seen a cat running by, looking behind bushes, even venturing into a cluttered yard of a hoarder.

We never found him that day. I thought that it would be near impossible to find this cat. And, even if we did find him, it would be even more difficult to coax him out of wherever he was hiding, now that we had scared him.

But I prayed. Fervently. In a way that I would not be able to pray today. That is, I prayed, really believing that God cared about this trivial detail in my life and believing that He had the power to bring this cat back to me. Yes, despite knowing that there were other prayers being submitted to God, like people praying for their lives in war torn countries, and starving children imploring God for food, I thought that God might find it in His will to do this one thing for me.

And He did. Or depending on your belief system, it happened, despite the odds. A week after the abduction, when I had given up all hope of seeing the cat again, a neighbor down the street saw the cat in some bushes near his house and coaxed him out with some pieces of meat. This neighbour had happened to be outside in his driveway when we were looking for the cat a week ago and we had approached him asking him if he had seen a tabby cat. Knowing that we had been looking for a lost cat, he came to our house and told us the good news. And that is how Xiao Hei became the happy grandcat of my parents that he is today, living in regal comfort in their empty nest.

My fourth cat, Mufassa, was a big boned cat who was unwanted by his owners and brought into our apartment by my sister as a suprise birthday present for me in medical school.

And lastly, my fifth and current cat, Max, followed me home one night as a kitten the first year that I moved to Portland, OR to start my residency in family medicine. I tried to run away from him when he started to follow me, because I was not sure that I should own a pet due to my many work hours away from home. But when I closed the door to my apartment, and reopened it a few minutes later, I could still see him with his paws leaning against the glass planes of the doorway trying to get into the foyer. In those minutes that I closed the door on him, I inwardly told myself that I could keep him if he was still there when I opened the door. And when I opened the door and saw him still there, I knew we were supposed to be together.

I did have a dog, briefly, for a day or two. My sister and I were in elementary school walking around the block selling chocolate for school (side note- who lets their kids walk around alone anymore going door to door to strangers homes?) and this dog with dark curly hair liked our chocolate and followed us home. We led him into our backyard and closed the fence door, and for a day, I was as happy as a clam with a pet dog. We named him Brownie. The next day, my sister opened the fence door and he left. I’m not actually sure if it was my sister’s doing, but I blame her to this day for undoing the one chance I had for a pet dog.

And so, I am waiting for my dog to come to me. In the meantime, I can’t help but wonder why Providence has sent so many cats into my life. Perhaps cats were built into my temperament when my celestial DNA was put together. Or perhaps the issue of lost cats and a sad girl is just easier to solve than the bigger problem of a billion hungry people in the world.