I Asked God to Take Him

It's Me, JussKyia | My Personal Blog JussKyia Lifestyle • jusskyialifestyle.com

My cat Tyson has stomatitis. Bad.

If you do not know what that is, it is severe inflammation in the mouth — the gums, the tissue, sometimes the throat. It is painful. Cats cannot tell you how painful, but you can see it. He stopped eating. He lost weight. He looked sick. He looked miserable. And I could not afford to take him to the vet.

I tried everything I could on my own. I researched natural remedies. I bought hemp oil, pain medicine, some herbal treatments, prednisone. For a few days, it worked. He started eating again. Put on a little weight. I thought, okay, we are getting somewhere. And then it came back. Worse. He was fighting the medicine. I was almost force-feeding him. And he just looked at me like he was done.

That night, I sat there holding him, tears running down my face, trying to give him his medicine, and I realized something. I was more emotional about this cat than I have ever been about my own children being sick. And that caught me off guard. But then I understood why. My kids could tell me where it hurt. They could say, "Mama, my stomach hurts" or "my head is pounding" or "I don't feel good." I could evaluate. I could treat. I could get them to a doctor. But Tyson cannot articulate his pain to me. He cannot tell me the degree of it, the location of it, whether it is getting better or worse. I just have to watch. And watching someone suffer when you cannot do anything about it is one of the most helpless feelings there is.

So I prayed. And the prayer surprised me.

I did not pray for God to open a door so I could afford the vet. I did not pray for money to show up. I did not even pray for a miracle healing — although I had prayed that before. This time, what came out of my mouth was something I meant with every part of me: Father God, if he is going to keep living in this pain, and I am unable to get him treated, I just pray that You take him. Take him out of this. Relieve him. Because this is no way to live.

And I meant it. I meant lay him to rest. I said, but I do not want to see it. I do not want to find him that way. But I was serious. And I still am.

That is a prayer most Christians will not admit to praying. But it is the most honest prayer I know. Because it is not about giving up. It is about loving something enough to want its suffering to end, even when the ending is not the one you would choose.

And sitting there with Tyson, watching my other cat walk over like, "you good?" — I thought about my mama.

When my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, she only lived a few weeks after the diagnosis. And it was sudden. It was dramatic. It was the kind of loss that takes your legs out from under you. But here is what I have never told most people: when she passed, I was happy for her. I rejoiced. Because my mama was not happy. She was battling things. Holding onto things. She had started sharing a little bit near the end, but you could see it in her behavior. She was uncomfortable in this life. And I knew — because she accepted Jesus as her Lord and Savior — that where she was going was better than where she was.

So when I prayed that prayer over Tyson, it was the same heart. The same theology. The same belief that I carry into every situation where I see suffering: to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And if being present with the Lord is the better place — and I believe with everything in me that it is — then sometimes the most loving prayer is not "heal them." Sometimes the most loving prayer is "take them home."

I know that sounds hard. I know some people will read that and think it sounds cold. But it is the opposite of cold. It is the warmest thing I know. It is saying, I love you too much to want you to keep hurting when there is a place where the hurting stops. And that place is real. And I trust the God who runs it.

And here is the part I did not even notice until I was driving to work the next morning, replaying the whole thing in my head: I never prayed for God to help me figure out a way to afford the treatment. I never asked Him to send money or open a financial door. My prayer went straight to comfort and release. That tells me something about where my heart naturally goes. I do not go to the logistics first. I go to the compassion first. I go to the person — or the animal — and what they are feeling. The money is a problem, yes. But the suffering is the emergency.

And maybe that is a flaw. Maybe I should have prayed for provision first and release second. But I did not. Because in that moment, holding a cat who could not tell me how much he was hurting, all I could think about was making the hurting stop. However God chose to do it.

That is how I think about a lot of things. And I think that is how God thinks about a lot of things too.

Field of Sunflowers

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants." — Psalm 116:15

If where they are going is better than where they are, then the most loving prayer you can offer is the one that lets them go.

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