Calico Dragon

I saw this cartoon when I was a kid, and it stuck in my head, for some reason. Every now and again, a picture from it will just sort of float up in my mind, like that little envelope that comes up on my office Outlook when I get an email.

I don’t remember if it was a Looney Tunes cartoon, or something else. I don’t remember if it was one of the musical variety, or the more traditional slapstick kind. I just remember this one character–it was a stuffed looking dragon made from many different colored fabrics, and rather haphazardly stitched together (that’s the way I remember it, anyway). In the cartoon, I think it was called a “calico dragon.”

I was thinking about that last night for some reason. I remember the tongue on the thing flicking out, and thinking the dragon was not frightening, or really even funny–just ridiculous looking. And it occurred to me that I sometimes feel like that stupid stitched together collection of fabric pieces, or at least see myself that way. The dragon in the cartoon did not really seem to fit together the way it was supposed to.

And that’s how I’ve felt in the past, up until fairly recently.

Like I was not stitched together the way I was supposed to be. Like the stitches I did have holding me together were not strong, and I never really felt like I could trust the thread.

Like the pieces of my fabric were too many and too varied to really even make sense together.

Like they could never really fit, not matter how I stitched them.

And I was right.

And that was the problem.

I had always done the stitching. I had always tried to sew up the tears and rents in my fabric. I had taken the thread from wherever I could find it.

But the truth was that I could never fix myself, no matter how much I tried. I could never stitch up the rents and tears in my fabric. I could never connect the pieces of my fabric together in a way that made sense to anyone, least of all myself.

I could not do it myself.

I don’t know if that dragon in the cartoon tried to patch himself together, but when I recall it in my mind, that’s how I see it.

And that’s how I saw myself. Many tattered pieces held together with fine, gossamer thread.

Weak thread.

I needed a thread that was stronger. I NEED a thread that is stronger. And the best part of it, the One doing the sewing will accept me whether or not my pieces are tightly knitted together. Yet He wants desperately to stitch me back up. And Once I accept him as Tailor, once I allow him to hold the pieces of my life separately, work them through his hands, and bind them together with the thread of life, then piece by piece, my mending will begin. That was, and sometimes remains, very hard for me to see, or remember.

And last night, when I heard the men in my group talking about parents, and some of the wounds they’d received from them (and the healing of those wounds for some), I thought of that calico dragon from my childhood. I could see him very clearly.

And remembered he was me. But slightly different. While some of the patches were still ragged, and barely held together, others were bound tightly, with bright shining thread. And while the colors still did not match, the way those pieces fit together made sense. And I was able to perceive with a little more clarity that my mending had indeed begun–had in fact been underway for some time, based on the amount of stitches.

none of this probably makes sense to anyone but me, but I suppose me is who I’m writing this for, anyway.

And God.

And to gather what remains of my thoughts….