A couple of weeks ago our family celebrated our first Family Fun Night. You can learn more about our Family Fun nights over at Kristia’s blog. The inspiration for that particular night was Horton the Elephant. Now, you may remember Horton from the fairly recent movie Horton Hears a Who! But my very first and most pleasant memory of good ole Horton is from the book, Horton Hatches the Egg. In fact its one of Kristia’s and my most favorite books as kids.
The story, in case your not familiar, is about a kindly elephant who is persuaded to sit on an egg while its mother, the good-for-nothing bird lazy Mayzie, takes a break. Little does Horton know that Mayzie is setting off for a permanent vacation in Palm Springs. He waits, and waits, never leaving his precarious branch, even through a freezing winter and a spring that’s punctuated by the insults of his friends. (“They taunted. They teased him. They yelled ‘How Absurd! Old Horton the Elephant thinks he’s a bird!'”) Still Horton stays faithful to his promise to take care of the egg and he is rewarded in the end by the surprise birth of… an elephant-bird.
Now as ridiculous as the story may seem, the mantra of this funny looking pacaderm is quite convicting: “I meant what I said, I said what I meant, an elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” That one sentence is what makes this book so endearing to me. Commitment (faithfulness) is not a commonly demonstrated characteristic in our culture, especially when things seem to get harder or not go the way we had planned. A lack of faithfulness, or commitment, to our promises to others, to our principles or standards of belief, or to simply doing what we know the right thing to be, left unchecked can lead to untrustworthy character.
So let’s get gut level honest: would you describe yourself as a “faithful” person? To what or to whom are you most faithful? To what discipline do you find it the hardest to be faithful? Lemme hear ya
Shannon Greer 