Giraffes

On top of my dresser sits a tiny porcelain giraffe.  When fear catches up to me, buckles my knees, and seizes my breath, my fingers seek this perfect replica of my favorite animal.  Isn’t it strange the things that comfort when our world consumes us with its darkness and fragility?

I discover myself at a loss to articulate for you why giraffes make my heart happy.  Maybe it’s their improbable oddity.  Perhaps that oddity is something to which I relate – fabulous creation that proves He has (at least a bit of) a sense of humor: gangly legs; over-stretched necks; tiny ears with small, dull horns; and lovely brown spots meant to help camouflage.  Giraffes are known to be gentle, and these slow-moving giants are mostly defenseless in a veldt full of predators.  Do you feel an inkling of association?

Next to my little giraffe, the one that my fingers trace with more and more regularity, sits a picture of the lighthouse that shines over Ocracoke island on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. If you walked through my house, you’d see this lighthouse represented over and over again on stained glass, in water color, painted on china disks. Why Ocracoke?  My grandmother’s family originated there, but more than that, if you’ve ever travelled down North Carolina’s highway 12 and then boarded the ferry – still the only way to get there – driven Ocracoke’s narrow lanes, sat on the porch of its coffee house, then rested on its pristine beach to watch the tide ebb and flow, you’d immediately understand.  I find Him there, in the island’s calm, in the island’s slow ways, I find Him.  And mostly because of this, lighthouses remind me that in the darkest of fogs, His loving light shines to dispel sorrow and agony, desiring that we not be lost in those moments that threaten to steal pieces of the authentic us.

Over the past few months, my migraine has refused to relent.  And, then you know that this affliction has recently stolen my sight completely in my right eye and partially my left.  I have been on my knees, and not in prayer but solely because I don’t know how to stand again in the face of this new heartbreak.  Perhaps what you don’t know, what I haven’t been brave enough to share with you, is that these horrendous headaches and now my partial blindness resulted from an assault that occurred many years ago.

Would it surprise you to hear that I have never before found myself angry with the desolate, marred man that damaged me?  But now, when I hurt so very much both physically and emotionally, rage bubbles to the surface, and I discover that I am, as yet, incapable of suppressing it. This rage terrifies me as much as the pain in my head and blackness – the blankness – in my eyes, but I also realize that the wrath that writhes inside me is impotent.  And for this impotence I am grateful and recognize in its ineffectualness His grace.

Regardless of the transitory nature of this fury, the anger repels me, and I would not choose it any more than I would the horrifying pain.  So, I find my fingers searching for my beautiful giraffe and my (partial) remaining eye seeking the comfort of the pictures of my lighthouse.  Please understand that the objects themselves truly aren’t relevant; instead the love and strength and mercy they prove remind me that I am treasured regardless of whether I intuit His adoration in the given moment.

I’m wondering what your fingers seek – even simply in your heart – to remind you of His adoration. Hope swells in me as I think of you through your trials, desiring that you possess at least one touchstone; you deserve- and I never use that word lightly – a reminder of Him, a reminder of His unwavering, reckless love.  After all, we live by faith alone.

You are precious to Him. You are precious to me.  Let your hand hold your giraffe and let your eyes seek your lighthouse; find Him there because in your brokenness and fear He awaits. He is there.  He is always there.