Desperately I prayed last Saturday as I hurried to the vet with a six-week old kitten whose hind legs were paralyzed — one of the four feral kittens at my house I was hoping would become tame. It got caught in the jasmine vine next to the swingset. I don’t know how long it hung there. I had to cut a small vine to get him out. We bonded for a moment before I set him back on the ground. He ran off with his hind legs dragging behind.

The kittens liked to sit and play with the vine next to the arm of the old swing. The instant a human was around, however, they ran home, wherever that was. A hiding place I’m sure. This is the kitten of momma cat that killed a blue jay a couple of weeks ago.

I didn’t see momma or the kittens through three usual feeding times the days before the tragedy. I had given up hoping one could be mine. Saturday morning things changed. No momma around as I looked through the glass door and patio windows. No kitten either, until I opened the door and heard it crying.

The days have been contemplative as I’ve watched the kitten hiding in my extra bath then under my bed, finally moving under the sofa. One leg has been restored, but the other drags behind. As I’ve watched, the sense that God is trying to show me something has been paramount.

More than one preacher has told how shepherds have been known to break the leg of a lamb that kept straying from the flock. He would then carry it on his shoulders until it healed. The lamb followed the shepherd from that day on.

What is God saying?

For one thing, that kitten never would have been in my house without the injury. Did God cause it? I don’t think so, but He uses everything to teach us his principles. When I found the following story on Facebook, I sensed it was confirmation.

The post read, “I was in Dollar Tree last night and there was a lady and two kids behind me in the LONG line. One was a big kid, one was a toddler. The bigger one had a pack of glow sticks and the baby was screaming for them so the Mom opened the pack and gave him one, which stopped his tears. He walked around with it smiling, but then the bigger boy took it and the baby started screaming again. Just as the Mom was about to fuss at the older child, he bent the glow sticks and handed it back to the baby.

“As we walked outside at the same time, the baby noticed that the stick was now glowing and his brother said, ‘I had to break it so you could get the full effect from it.’ I almost ran because l could hear God saying to me, ‘I had to break you to show you why I created you. You had to go through it so you could fulfill your purpose.’ That little baby was happy just swinging that unbroken glow stick around in the air because he didn’t understand what it was created to do, which was glow.

“There are some people who will be content just ‘being’ but some of us that God has chosen, we have to be ‘broken.’ We have to get sick. We have to lose a job. We go through divorce. We have to bury our spouse, parents, best friend or our child because, in those moments of desperation, God is breaking us. But when the breaking is done, then we will be able to see the reason for which we were created,” the post said.

Needless to say, I was sure of what I suspected all along. There are lessons to be learned from this little kitten.

He’s mine now, Mr. Tux, Tuxedo or Tuxy — black with white markings and boots. The one I’d watched through the window with the stripe of white fur on the inside of his back leg, the same one that still drags behind.

I know that because he came out from under the sofa last night for the first time and played — keeping his distance still.