A Matter of Perception

I woke up this morning to the sound of our cat playing with a jingle bell somewhere in our house.

I know you probably read that sentence and think... "um.... wooo?" But I have a story to tell, my friends, so pull up a chair and let me explain why I would start off with that.

I was first annoyed because I am not a fan of our cat waking us up playing with her toys, which she does on very rare occasions. She usually likes to dive into something noisy at around 5am, a couple hours before we are ready to be woken. This sequence of events usually involves me climbing out of bed, tracking down the cat and her toy, taking the toy away, and stashing it somewhere high up, or in a drawer, and crawling back into bed to try to grab a few more hours of sleep. This was my plan when I heard the bell this morning. I rolled over, and looked at the clock, and saw that it was 7am, exactly when I needed to be getting out of bed, and I saw that my alarm clock hadn't gone off like it was supposed to. This brings me to my point...

We haven't bought our cat a jingle bell toy in over a year.
I thought I had thrown away all the bells in our house for this reason.
I can't find the bell now when I go looking for it.
She quit playing with it as soon as I got out of bed and started getting ready for work.
She didn't start playing with it until it was time to wake me up.

Now, let me start this by saying that I am a person guilty of scoffing at people for "over spiritualizing" things. I have a firm faith in God, I believe He works in our lives and that He watches out for us, but I don't believe that EVERYTHING is His doing. I believe that sometimes there are coincidences. Sometimes, we reap the benefit or consequence of someone else's decisions. Sometimes things really do just happen. I believe that if you get accepted to college, it is just as much the time and effort and work that you put into studying throughout school as it is some divine "luck" that you were accepted. I think our sweat and tears and labor means as much to the outcome of things as chance, or as the hand of God.

That being said, I could not help but feel that I was being taken care of this morning. I could not help but feel that someone was watching out for me. It was time for me to get up and get to work, the alarm was not going off, so the cat was put to work with the mysterious, missing jingle bell.

What about you? What is your perception of events when things like this happen to you? Are you one that sees God in everything, or are you more a believer in chance and circumstance?

I am really curious to know...