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Learning to Get Back
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
Adapted from "Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching
from Leadership Journal Baker Books |