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UNFAMILIAR WORDS
Caricature: an exaggerated portrait of
a person [Go back]
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One day not too long ago I was driving down a county road.
I slowed when I saw a turtle in the center of the road. A car was coming
the other way. As we approached the turtle, we both slowed to allow it
room between us. Just as we three met, the turtle, sensing danger, slowly
pulled his head and four legs into the shell.
Safe!
Or at least that's what he must have thought. The other driver
and I, now at complete stops, smiled at this turtle's foolish defense mechanism.
Though the turtle might now feel secure in the darkness of his shell, he
was still in the dead center of a fairly active county road. The other
driver did the honors: he scooped the turtle up and tossed him into the
grass in the ditch. We both smiled again and went on our ways.
That turtle may seem dumb to you and me, but when God designed
him with a shell for his defense, God was showing us humans a little picture
of ourselves...a caricature.
I'll bet you can remember a time you heard a noise and were scared as you
lay in your bed and what did you do? You pulled the covers up over your
head. Now let's be honest: did you really think those covers could stop
a bad guy or a monster from getting you?
I've seen little kids use an even sillier way to avoid danger:
they simply squeeze their eyes shut tight. If I can't see it, it doesn't
exist, they seem to say.
Teenagers sometimes play the role of the turtle at school.
I heard about a family who had moved to a new town. The teenage daughter
didn't want to move. She had trouble making new friends at the new school.
She began to spend all her time in her bedroom listening to music. Her
mother became concerned that she was withdrawing into her "shell" and tried
to take her out to events where the young lady might meet new people. But
the daughter resisted: it was safer inside that bedroom.
Even adults react this way at times. I knew a man who got
behind in his bills. What he should've done was to write down all the amounts
of money he owed, all he had coming in, and figured out how to pay his
bills. He should have called the people he owed and told them how he planned
to pay them back. But he was a turtle. He simply took the bills as they
came in the mail each day and shoved them into a kitchen drawer. He showed
me the drawer; it was stuffed full of envelopes. When I asked him if he
was worried that he was going to get into trouble, he said, "What else
am I supposed to do? I can't pay them."
Of course, God didn't give the turtle his hard shell to make
a fool of him. He gave it as a proper and normal defense against the turtle's
foes. A dog won't eat him because he can't bite through that shell. And
it must work: turtles are some of nature's longest living animals with
some reaching lifespans of over 100 years.
But in designing this method, the great Creator was doing
more than giving the turtle a way to ward off his enemies: God was using
the turtle to paint a picture of you and me. He probably had a smile on
His face when He came up with the idea of the "shell defense." He knows
it's our tendency to want to hide from our problems, to pretend they don't
exist. So He has shown us this weakness by creating an animal that withdraws
into its shell. In His portrait of this human weakness He seems to be telling
us, "Don't be a turtle!"
Question: Can you think of another animal that
tries to solve his problems by hiding from them?
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