Last year my daughter started feeding a stray, female, black cat that we named Miss Alice. Well since then things have progressed. First two other stray, orange, male cats that we named Garfield and Tang also showed up wanting to be fed. Then the local birds noticed and started flying down to feast on any left over cat food after those three had finished eating. Now my daughter has become like an animated Disney princess. Anytime she walks outside the animals gather around.

The only one who seems unhappy with this new arrangement is Miss Alice. She will often chase the male cats away until she is finished eating. And the other day when I walked over to my daughter’s house Alice came up meowing asking to be loved on. While I was scratching her head and petting her back, Tang saw what was happening and also meowed for attention. The second he did Miss Alice hissed him away. She wasn’t about to share me or anything else.

The thing that Alice the cat doesn’t understand is something that took me years to learn too. It is that there is an amazing thing about love. It is a thing that confounds poets and philosophers. It is a thing that makes mathematicians heads spin. It is a thing that we can’t fully understand but just have to accept on faith. It is the truth that the more love you share and give away, the more love you have. Some gentle, loving souls like my daughter seem to know this intuitively. The rest of us have to learn it the hard way.

Either way it is a true miracle. It is in sharing love that we connect ourselves with the love that fills the universe, the love that created all things, the love that our Father in Heaven has for us all. It truly is in loving that we are loved. It is in loving that we are lifted up. It is in loving that we grow as God’s children. May we all learn this even if poor Miss Alice never does.