Turtle on a Fencepost

Dear Daughters,

I have never seen a turtle on a fencepost in real life, but you can imagine it didn’t get up there by itself.  Maybe it wasn’t even in favor of the idea.

I just finished the book Turtle on a Fencepost by June Rae Wood.  It’s a young teen’s book, and a beautiful story – complete with intergenerational characters, problems with friends, mourning, scuffles with family, physical disabilities, misunderstandings, pre-judging people and many other typical human struggles.

Back in the small farming era, most any farmer plowing with a tractor would pick up turtles and set them on fence posts, rather than smash them under their tires.  At the end of the day, it was usually the job of the farmer’s kids to walk the fences and put the turtles safely back down on the ground.

There were times, when one of the mean kids in the county would leave a turtle stranded on a post, laughing as the legs paddled through the air trying to find land – then walk away.

Delrita, the main character of Turtle on a Fencepost, had recently lost her parents in a car accident, was living with her uptight Aunt Queenie with painted-on eyebrows, Uncle Bert who donned a toupee, and her crotchety old WWII veteran Gramps.

In a sense, all those people living under the same roof were turtles, each on their own fencepost.  None of them had chosen the role they were living, and none understood the other.  But because they continued to do life together, trying to be family even when the feelings weren’t there, they learned to appreciate and eventually love each other.

There were reasons why Aunt Queenie was so rigid, why Gramps was always critical and never satisfied with anything or anyone.  Delrita had her own reasons for constantly lashing out at the people living in her household.  But when each person started to be honest and speak about their past, their griefs and their crushed dreams, they learned to look past the quirks and oddities of each other and embrace the abundance of good that eventually became apparent.

I became so thoroughly captivated with the book that I stayed up later than usual reading.  It wasn’t quite as riveting as John Grishom or Ted Dekker, but stories about human interactions and conflicts always grab my attention.

Then I got thinking about families – the annoyances we all have with each other at times, those rough edges we see especially when we live and work with people – and remembered the saying:

Be kind.  For everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about.

When I used to stop at a signal, waiting for the light to turn green, I would look at some of the picture perfect people sitting in cars around me and think that surely their lives were easy.  Surely they had a good job, a family without strife, friends that loved and appreciated them.

But after all these years of living and talking with many seemingly picture perfect people, I have found that there is no such thing.  We all sin in many ways, offend others without intending, and bristle when they annoy us.

Everyone is fighting a hard battle – but there are a lot of us fighting hard battles after losing a whole string of other battles.  Ann Voskamp

That’s exactly why Jesus tells us to be compassionate and forgive when people hurt us.  We know very little about what is going on in the hearts of others, but we do know that we all – without an exception –  suffer from the same human condition.  The condition that tempts us to judge, hold on to hurts, to think we are always right and the other is wrong.

It’s Jesus who works in us and others to become more like him.  We are all on different time lines, and if we simply remember what we were like many moons ago, perhaps we will have more grace with others.   It’s hard work to live that way, but as I have always told my students, and what I still constantly need to remind myself:

There’s nothing wrong with hard.

So…that’s the story about the turtle on the fencepost.  The analogy is beautiful and the lessons are many.  I pray that we all may be willing to help any stranded turtles we see so they can quit swimming in the air and be planted on firm ground.

Love, Mom