Our sausage dog, Carrie, absolutely hates cats! She has this special mewling growl sound that she makes when she sees them in our front garden. If I let her out the front door, she dashes after them to scare them off our lawn and then sniffs out all the places they have been.
Usually, because she is only a little dog, cats don’t take her very seriously. The neighbours’ ones run off our property but if Carrie tries to confront them on theirs, they will arch up and hiss, and she generally backs off.
However, Carrie met her match yesterday. While on our walk, she spotted a cat hiding near a car and went for it. The dog didn’t take the hissing warning it gave her and when she tried to make it run, it pounced instead and dug its claws into her.
Carrie was astonished and yelped in outrage and pain. She quickly ran back to me but wasn’t badly hurt – just a scratch or two on her tummy. However, I’m sure she’ll think twice before pushing her luck with a cat again!
It made me think of how we can get complacent about dangers and temptations in our lives. We think we have them under control and that they can do us no harm, but those addictions we think we’ve mastered, those negative thoughts we are sure we’ve overcome or those habits we think we’ve broken, can so easily turn on us in a moment of weakness and attack in our soft underbelly, where we are most vulnerable.
That is why the Bible admonishes us to “flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18) and to “have nothing to do with fruitless works of darkness” (Ephesians 5:11) and to continually be on our guard against the Devil, who “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8).
Don’t mess with evil, don’t try and pick a fight with it – just run.