“Several years ago a woman was spending her holidays on one of the barrier islands in South Carolina. It happened to be the time of year when the loggerhead turtles (huge, three-hundred-pound sea turtles) were laying their eggs. One night a very large female dragged herself onto the beach and laid her egs. The woman did not want to distrub the turtle, so she left and came back the next morning, anxious to find where the turtle had laid her eggs. Alarmingly, what she found were some tracks heading the wrong direction. The turtle apparently lost her bearings and wandered into the hot sand dunes where death was certain. The woman followed the tracks and soon found the turtle covered with hot dry sand. Thinking quickly, she covered the turtle with seaweed, poured cool seawater over her, and ran to notify a park ranger. He arrived in a few minutes in a jeep. The ranger flipped the turtle over, wrapped tire chains around her front legs, and hooked the chains to the trailer hitch on the jeep. Then he drove off, dragging her through the sand so fast her mouth filled with sand and her head bent back as if it would break. At the edge of the ocean, he unhooked her and flipped her right side up. She didn’t move. The water began to lap against her body, cleaning off the dry sand. When the waves were much larger, suddenly she began to move, slowly at first, and then when the water was deep enough, she pushed off into the water and disappeared.
The woman makes this observation: ‘Watching her swim slowly away and remembering her nightmare ride through the dunes, I noticed that sometimes it is hard to tell whether you are being killed or being saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.’
All the turtle could do was hang on, and hanging on was pretty darn miserable. She could easily have died, but she lived. It must have been one terrifying ride though the dunes. If tutles can experience fear, this turtle must have done so, but it was life-giving fear, it was life-saving fear, it was upside-down fear that always comes when we put ourselves in the hands of Jesus.”