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:
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