Get Up
Bringing a
giraffe into the world is a tall order. A baby giraffe falls 10 feet from its
mother’s womb and usually lands on its back. Within seconds it rolls over and
tucks its legs under its body. From this position it considers the world for
the first time and shakes off the last vestiges of the birthing fluid from its
eyes and ears. Then the mother giraffe rudely introduces its offspring to the
reality of life.
In his book,
“A View from the Zoo”, Gary Richmond describes how a newborn giraffe learns its
first lesson.
The mother giraffe lowers her head long enough to take a quick look. Then she positions herself directly over her calf. She waits for about a minute, and then she does the most unreasonable thing. She swings her long, pendulous leg outward and kicks her baby, so that it is sent sprawling head over heels.
When it
doesn’t get up, the violent process is repeated over and over again. The
struggle to rise is momentous. As the baby calf grows tired, the mother kicks
it again to stimulate its efforts. Finally, the calf stands for the first time
on its wobbly legs.
Then the
mother giraffe does the most remarkable thing. She kicks it off its feet again.
Why? She wants it to remember how it got up. In the wild, baby giraffes must be
able to get up as quickly as possible to stay with the herd, where there is
safety. Lions, hyenas, leopards, and wild hunting dogs all enjoy young
giraffes, and they’d get it too, if the mother didn’t teach her calf to get up
quickly and get with it.
The late
Irving Stone understood this. He spent a lifetime studying greatness, writing
novelized biographies of such men as Michelangelo, Vincent van Gogh, Sigmund
Freud, and Charles Darwin.
Stone was once
asked if he had found a thread that runs through the lives of all these
exceptional people. He said, “I write about people who sometime in their life
have a vision or dream of something that should be accomplished and they go to
work.
“They are
beaten over the head, knocked down, vilified, and for years they get nowhere. But
every time they’re knocked down they stand up. You cannot destroy these people.
And at the end of their lives they’ve accomplished some modest part of what
they set out to do.”
- Craig B. Larson
Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching from Leadership Journal
Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching from Leadership Journal
