Crashing for Turtles

I was driving to Annual Conference the first weekend in June…in Traverse City…after class…in Fort Wayne.  It was a five-hour drive after a four-hour class after an hour-and-a-half drive.  I wasn't exactly looking forward to it. I plugged in an audio book novelette (that I was bound and determined to finish before I arrived…I did) and began the northward journey. 

I was a little more than half way through and driving past Grand Rapids on 131.  Traffic was pretty busy, and, eager to be done with my drive, I weaved in and out of the lanes at 77 mph with the cars merging in and off the expressway.  Until, all of the sudden, the right lane was at a near standstill, hazard lights creating a parade. 

Cars flew by, passing the parade at an otherwise normal speed.  Already in the left lane, I was one of them.  I slowed and looked curiously towards the beginning of the line.  And then I saw the reason for the cautious traffic.  Looking to have made it across the merging lane and into right lane was a huge box turtle.

It took giant steps, racing across the traffic.  I was proud of its persistence but as it made it ever closer to the left lane of northbound traffic, I thought for sure it was toast.  I flew past but looked back several times in my review mirror.  A giant red semi barreled ahead.   I wanted to close my eyes but realizing I was looking in my review mirror, I simply focused on the road ahead, cheering on the turtle I was positive was about to reach its certain doom. 

I glanced back one last time as I merged to the right and saw it.  The semi saw the turtle, now just a dark speck in the dead middle of the lane.  The driver pulled so far to the left, the truck tilted in the ditch.  It’s tail and nose were in the lane, creating a semi-circle hedge of protection as the turtle continued in its unstopped mission to the grass and the truck made its way slowly back onto the road. 

I cheered!  Like literally clapped a couple of times.

And I texted a friend (through voice-to-text, calm yourselves) and told him, in very short version, about the miraculous turtle save and the semi who swerved off the road for it.  He responded shortly after with a message that read “good for the turtle! But be safe! Don’t go crashing for turtles!”

I decided, first, that “Crashing for Turtles” would be an EXCELLENT band name (if you are looking for a band name and use it, please give me at least a nod of credit or let me play kazoo in one song or something because you know it’s a sweet name!).  And then I was struck by the profundity of the phrase.

The idea of what it meant to crash for turtles and whether it was a good thing or bad thing, metaphorically, consumed me all through conference. And then for days.  Even weeks.  I declared it one of the most beautiful images of self-sacrifice I could possibly muster, and I dreamed of writing about it.  The latter might not seem like much but for someone who hasn’t wrote anything of greater worth than a research paper in months, the desire to write fanned the tiniest little spark inside of me. A spark that said maybe all of the pieces of me I thought I once knew weren’t gone…

Then life got in the way.  First it was school: Heady reading and several papers.  Then the end of my job where I was working way too many hours.  Then camp.  Then the start of another class.  Then just about the time I felt compelled to maybe, just maybe, finish my thoughts and what it meant to crash for a turtle in my twisted brain of metaphors and pictures and images…more life got in the way. When I opened the file on my computer marked “crashing for turtles” today – it was dated as “last edited by user on July 17”.  Significant because that was a day before the boy who, technically, coined the phrase (though my brain did all of the running away with it, so it was never really his or had anything to do with him), suddenly but quietly exited my life.  At almost the exact same time, I found out a dear friend was killed in a fatal car accident.  I lost all desire to talk about crashing for anything.  Let alone turtles. 

But more than two months later and the image hasn’t left.  If anything, it’s become richer and more meaningful and poignant.  And harder and more painful and more real… Because, you see, ultimately, the idea of crashing for turtles is about putting yourself on the line for something inferior. It either displays the ultimate heart of service or the reality of being made a slave and the distance between the two is striking. 

There is something incredible, for me, in the concept of the turtle as a person or mission or reality.  Someone not inferior in value or worth but in some other way. (*Insert the first disenfranchised, discriminated, unrecognized, or “forgotten” person or people group that comes to your mind here, for example*).  I love to the point of chills and tears what it means for the biggest and most powerful (of which all off us are in different places and spaces) to throw a piece of themselves off the proverbial road to protect the innocent, the vulnerable, the ones without the means to protect themselves (and yes this can be as simple as greeting the visitors sitting in the fifth row on the right at church even if you’re not really the outgoing type).  Creating that semi-circle of protection.  It's something I witnessed my friend Nick do often...and there were many previous "turtles" who attended his funeral to tell the tales...

And, though the semi put itself at risk, made the choice to protect, it was only part. Because what actually happened, as happened with the right lane of cars previous, is that it forced the cars behind it to stop and take notice. The turtle survived that day because if it was important enough for a big ol’ semi to throw itself off the road, then surely it was important enough for the sedan behind it to at least look towards what it was swerving around.  I was awed by the thought that I passed a mile of cars in the right lane (and merging lane) going nare 10mph with hazard lights on and those in the back would have NO IDEA the reason for the first and yet they too had trusted that the reduced speed and caution was important and necessary. 

I think this kind of crashing for turtles in underused and important and Biblical.  It seems like it is very much like the task of the Good Samaritan, the call of the Rich Young Ruler, and the drive of the early church (among many other things).  In our me-centric world of selfish gain and a gospel that fits my needs and wants and ministry in my comfort zones and is convenient for my schedule and matches my political leanings and my picture of the way the world should go…there is something unfortunately revolutionary and uncommonly heroic about the one who choose to lay aside her [comfortable, convenient, satisfying, desired, etc] life for her friends.  Let alone a vulnerable stranger.

And yet I’m torn. Not with that particular reality but because “crashing for turtles” is a metaphor with a double-edged sword. I’m torn because I realize that if something had happened with that giant red semi, if the itty-bitty little sedan behind it didn’t slow or stop or see, if traffic felt the need to dangerously merge at the wrong time, real people in real time could have been really hurt.  If that had happened, the headlines on the paper wouldn’t read “huge box turtle courageously saved by sacrificial truck driver”, it would have read something terrible like “Alcohol not in play in Thursday’s deadly accident”.  And no one would have easily forgiven the report of “Driver notes turtle cause of Thursday’s crash causing two deaths and seven injuries…”  Because the very real actual turtle was important and worthwhile. But not as valuable or worthwhile as that of a human life. 

And we all crash for these kinds of non-literal turtles.  We all have things in our lives that get valued above and beyond what is right and reasonable.  We have “turtles” which are given worth and importance and investment…turtles that, in seeking to save, we destroy parts of ourselves, parts of lives. I think about the long-toted idols of work and money and busyness and sex and drugs and stuff and gluttony. And the seventeen other deadly sins and whatever else it is that seems like something we are willing to stake our lives on, willing to crash for, things which seem like they are worth something and maybe some are in the short term but aren’t worth anything near a human life.  I think about the nights I didn’t sleep to finish the homework I was unwilling to settle for a “B” on.  I think about the jobs I went above and beyond simply to prove to someone else, somewhere else, that I had what it took.  I think about my sometimes consuming anxiety or my crippling thought obsessions. I think about the relationship with a boy who first caused me, quite unknowingly, to spiral from the phrase “crashing for turtles” at all.  The relationship being something I was willing to crash for but in the end being something which, when it crashed, how it crashed, deeply affected how I knew and understood “me” and what I had in value and worth.  I think about all of the friendships I’ve had which ended in one way or another.  Those too being something I would crash for and did crash for and yet caused the same and even worse crash of identity when it came to trying to decide why some people stay and some people go. 

I think about the ways that “self-care” is becoming a needed and important piece of mental health education…not because of the selfishness created in a me-centric reality but because in knowing and doing and moving and being (often out of an unhealthy core and unhealthy identity) people crash and burn in a way that seems to destroy them and takes others down with them and leaves them no good to themselves or anyone else.  And sometimes those are the same people who thought they were saving some turtle, when in fact nothing was saved and much was lost.

I’m stuck with these competing narratives, the ones warring against each other that demand an answer.  Any answer.  And the answer is important because it seems like the turtles I am willing to crash for or the ones I already do and have say a great deal about who I am and whose I am.  So I’m desperate to know and see and understand. I want the answer telling me how to move forward.  How to know which turtles to crash for and which to entrust.  Answers that say something like “this is how you know what turtles are worth it!” or “here is a definitive way to know whether or not this crash is Christlike or chaos inducing” or “when you encounter a turtle that you are unsure of, proceed with the following seven steps…”  But life isn’t like that, is it?  Life is full of questions and incomprehinsibles and unknowables and things most unfair. 

And so, despite the fact words have finally made it to page, I’m still caught in the tension.  I wish I weren’t.  I like when things wrap up in neat packages.  When there are conclusions and steps to purpose.  When I finish writing something and can tie some sort of bow and say “This. These. Here are the words which have been burning deep and needing to be found.”  But I’m only newly back into the writing world.  And these words themselves are coming out of place of tension – of both insecurity and hope. So, turtles or not, perhaps, the tension must remain.  And maybe little by little it can be less about me and more about the God I wish to serve.  And maybe that will be enough…