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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 |
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