I'm Mike the Turtle

A Picture of a Turtle on a Post:

Here is a picture of a turtle on a post.

I first encountered this picture as the background on my brother’s phone. I asked him, as I'm sure you would have done in my place, “Why do you have a turtle on a post in the background?” He said it was from something someone had said to him about humility. They said that when you see a turtle on a post like that you know for certain that they didn’t get up there by themselves. They had help. And as Christians, when we do life well - when we are actually loving, forgiving, or generous, when something we do really touches somebody's heart, or genuinely changes the world, or helps someone meet Jesus - we know that we didn’t do it by ourselves. We had help.

An Obvious Observation About Walking on Water:

A while ago my pastor Simon Deeks was talking about the bit in the bible when Jesus walks on water. Peter sees him and says he wants to do it too, so Jesus calls him out onto the water, and Peter steps out of the boat, and he actually does it. He walks on water. And then he starts looking at the big waves and the storm all around him and he gets scared – and as he stops trusting Jesus he starts to sink. Straight away Jesus reaches out and grabs him and the two of them get back in the boat. But here’s the thing that Simon was saying: Peter looks at the waves and the storm, and thinks “I can’t walk on water in these conditions!” – but since when did the water being choppy make it any harder to walk on it? It’s impossible. It’s always impossible. The weather is irrelevant. The thing is a miracle from start to finish. And that’s true, for people who try to follow Jesus like Peter did, for our whole lives. God lives in us, and genuinely works through us to love and rescue people, and restore the world. That is a miracle from start to finish. But when things get choppy we start to worry and lose our trust that he can do it – when actually it’s been impossible the whole time, but he's been doing it anyway.

I Finally Get to the Point:

All this is really an elaborate introduction to the fact that in the last few days a lot of pretty serious disappointments have come my way. Four big ones, and then some little ones. Things that I’ve been genuinely gutted about. And I was getting a bit annoyed with God about that. Because they were all things I was excited about for his sake – things I thought he was doing – and then it turned out he wasn’t doing what I thought. For example, if you read the last blog, you’ll know about Scott. Scott hasn’t picked up his phone.  I’ve been calling him a lot, and once he texted me saying sorry he missed the call and could I phone later, and I did, and no answer, and no answer any of the other times, and no replies to my texts either. So here I am, thinking, “God – surely the plan was for me to meet him and be friends and for us to eat together and for me to tell him about you?” And I have no idea why he’s not picking up. But he’s not.

The only thing that has occured to me, that starts to make some sense of it, is that last week I prayed some very serious prayers, along the lines I’ve been praying for ages, that God would make me humble. That he’d cut out my arrogance and my judgemental-ness, and replace it with genuine, joyful, child-like humility. And then this week, everything stops going to plan. And it might just be a coincidence, but it also might just be a coincidence that God is using. To gently say, ‘Mike, here’s a humbling thing for you. You are a turtle on a post. Everything you have ever done for me that worked, I did it through you. You will not always succeed because you have no magic powers. You are not a flying turtle. I just picked you up.’

So there’s the big punchline for you. After much deliberation, my conclusion is this: I am not a flying turtle.

A Post Script:

I wrote this at two o’clock this morning, and looking back at it again, it strikes me that what I’m doing here is trying to work out what it is that God is doing by not doing what I think he’s doing in all these situations.  If that makes sense. Anyway, my point is that I could well be wrong about this just as much as I was about all the other things. Maybe God is doing something entirely different, or lots of separate things none of which I’ve got a hope of guessing. But there we go, for now I’ll just go on the basis that whether he’s intentionally ‘teaching it’ to me or not, it’s definitely true that I’m just a normal turtle, that I’m just a child. And I want to be the kind of kid that’s not too proud to ask his Dad to pick him up.

Meet Scott

This blog is about a guy I met last night called Scott. I’m not in a spectacularly political mood, and even if I was I don’t think I’d have that many answers to suggest; but I just want to tell you about Scott because I am really glad that I met him. I can’t vouch for the guy obviously, so I can’t promise everything he told me is true, but he seemed a deeply honest, straightforward guy. So here’s what happened.

I was about to walk past him on the street and he very politely started to ask if I could spare him any change – I started to say “I’m really sorry mate” as I walked past, and he immediately stopped asking, and said “No don’t worry at all mate, have a good night.” As he started to walk off I thought – ‘Mike. You have nothing you need to do right now. Jesus loves that guy just like he loves you, and he wants you to be with him and show him some love. Don’t be a coward. He’s not big or scary. And don’t be lazy or selfish. Get him a coffee.’

So I turned round and said, “Actually, I’d be up for coming with you and getting a hot drink or something?” And he said he would really love that. So I grabbed my bike and we walked across to MacDonalds on the basis that it’s always open. We chatted along the way, and he mentioned that he’d been living in a tent for a year. I asked him how he’d become homeless. He said that he used to live with his mum, but that the bedroom tax thing had come in and it was a 3 bed house, and she couldn’t afford it, so she’d had to move in with her brother, in his 2 room maisonette. So Scott had nowhere to stay. At the time he had a good job managing a garage on the edge of Cambridge, but after a while of him turning up unshaven or unwashed every few mornings (he was couch surfing with friends when he could, but he says with a lot of them he ended up crossing the line of overstaying his welcome) they asked him to take a break, and come back when he’d got his life back on track. He said you can’t receive benefits with no fixed abode. He’s on the waiting list for the council to get him housing, but he says there are too many people with a more urgent need, so he’s hoping for a letter to arrive at his mum’s house soon, but he’s not too optimistic. The homeless shelters in Cambridge are all full or specifically for people who are mentally ill as well, except Jimmy’s Night Shelter, which might have space, but it doesn’t have any more spaces for people with dogs, and Scott has a dog who he loves, called Slinky – after the dog from Toy Story.

So at the moment he lives in a tent. He’s been moved on six times in just over a year by the council, and now he’s in a place so isolated that no one’s likely to report him, but no one’s likely to befriend him either. If the council find his stuff they are allowed to just take it, and he would have to pay to get it back.

He asked me what I do, I said I was studying English. He asked what I wanted to do with that, and I told him that maybe I wanted to work telling people about Jesus, so we talked about that for a bit. He said his mum was a Christian but his Dad wasn’t, and he’d gone to Sunday school a bit but he’d never owned a bible, never really knew what it was all about. I wished I had a bible with me to give to him, but I didn’t, and so I suggested that we could meet again, get a MacDonalds and read some of the accounts of Jesus life and chat about it, using this thing called ‘UNCOVER’ that my brother had told me about. He said he’d be really keen for that, and it turned out he still has a phone, so we exchanged numbers, and I’ll call him sometime this week.

I am aware that this is not the most poetic or mind-blowing or funny of blogs – but the whole thing just felt really normal to me so I don't feel much urge to write it exceptionally. It was just like one person getting to know another. Which is, to be fair, what it was. But at the same time I felt like it was important, and something good was happening in me (and I hope in him) when we said goodbye and shook hands. So I thought I’d share it. 

A Story About Baby Elephants

Somebody told me an absolutely cracking story the other day. All credit and many thanks to Sam Brennan, who was that somebody, and has brought the brilliance of this story into my life. It goes like this…

A man is being shown around backstage at an old circus. The trainer shows him where the elephants are standing around, chains round their ankles holding them to posts in the ground.
“Wow!” says the man, “they seem very calm, do they not mind being chained up like that?”
“Oh they don’t like it,” replied the trainer, “they don’t like it at all.”
“Well in that case, why aren’t they struggling? Are the chains too strong for them? Have they given up?”
“Actually, the chains are not too strong for them at all. These are 4 ton elephants. They could snap those things easily. Even if they couldn’t, to be honest if they tried they could pull the whole post out of the ground!”
“What? Then why don’t they?”
“They have been in these chains since they were very young. When they were just babies they used to try to run away and break the chains, but they weren’t strong enough. So they stopped trying. And now, they just don’t try.”

I love that story. Not because it makes me happy to think about chained up elephants obviously – it’s pretty tragic in it’s own way – but because I think it’s so true. Everyone was laughing at me after Sam told it the other night because I was doing such a massive wide-eyes ‘oh-that’s-such-a-good-story’ face! So here’s a couple of things it makes me think.

One: We Don’t Know Now So We Assume We Can’t Know Ever.

I think there are a lot of people in the world today who are convinced that we can’t really know the answers to the big questions. That we can’t really discover any proper truth about who we are or what the world is or what we’re supposed to do with our lives. So for a lot of people the best we can do is 1) guess, 2) not overcommit, and 3) try to get along. And that’s a decent start I’ll grant – better than 1) guess, 2) kill everyone that guessed differently – but what if that’s settling for much less than we’re capable of? What if that’s just standing around thinking the chains are too strong for us when really we could be free? What I mean is: when was the last time most people really tried to investigate the answers to the big questions? To be honest I think a lot of us feel like we’re too busy to think about, read about, or talk about the meaning of life. And when you think about it that seems a little bit silly. And I honestly believe that we can know the answers, that we can discover who we are and what we’re living for – I believe that the chains are not too strong for us. So let’s give ‘em a go, surely? *

Two: We Think We’ll Always Be Normal, When God Can Make Us Wonderful.

I think a lot of Christians end up like the elephants in a different way, stuck where we are when we could so definitely be free. We have somehow been led to believe that while God is capable of creating the universe, inventing the supernova and the crafting the kiwi-fruit; capable of turning water into wine, giving sight to the blind, and raising Jesus from the dead; he is mysteriously not capable of changing who we are. That’s not true. He is able – not just that but he is ready and eager – to transform us completely. To take us, little problematic people that we are, and make us well-springs, volcanoes, where the unlimited, unimaginable love and light and goodness of God erupts into the world. He is able to deal with – and by deal with I mean deal with and be done with – our fears, our insecurities, our failures, the things about us that hurt people, the things about us that hurt ourselves. He’s a 4 ton elephant and he can break us out of whatever trap we’re in, whatever cycle, whether that’s really nasty dark stuff or whether it’s just feeling uninteresting and unimportant. All we’ve got to do is ask him, get his help, press into him, and trust him. I hope this doesn’t sound too much just like fancy words, because I really believe it’s true – it’s not always easy or painless but it is true. You may think that you’re a little baby elephant and the chains are too strong – but the biggest elephant in the world put your chain round his ankle just to be with you, and if you’ll let him, he can uproot everything that ties you down. Seriously – he can uproot galaxies.

But the elephants just stopped trying. And they never knew what it felt like to be free.

*The big reason that I think we can know is in the video I made at Christmas, it’s on the blog here in December, called ‘Yuri the Spaceman and Hamlet the Prince’!

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