As a college student, I spent my summers as a life guard and camp counselor. During the weekends, the camp director would take the staff for boat rides around the lake. It seemed like every five minutes, he said, “See that turtle over there” or “Look at that turtle sunny itself on that log”. I don’t think I saw a turtle before he saw it at any point during that entire summer. Funny thing is that I also never saw a turtle on my own when I went out on the boat out without him.
I was reminded of this story recently when I conducted a weekend leadership retreat with a Division I basketball team. One of the activities that the team organized was picking up trash along a scenic beachfront stretch of road. As we walked along the side of the road, we encounter a lot of trash as you might expect. We also saw cigarette butt after cigarette butt littered in the vegetation. In the next hour, it seemed like that was the only thing we saw. As we talked about this activity afterward, some of the players remarked that they were amazed at how much trash was laying on the side of the road. They mentioned that they had never really noticed cigarette butts on the ground before. But to make the area cleaner, they began picking up cigarette butt after cigarette butt because they started looking for them.
Do you know why I never saw the turtles? Because I wasn’t looking for turtles. My camp director was looking for turtles. Guess what? He found them. I wasn’t looking for turtles and guess what? I never found them.
The basketball players never noticed cigarette butts until they started looking for them. Once that happened, they found loads of them.
Many of us see our own version of the turtles (or cigarette butts) every day. We want to see life a certain way. We look for things that confirm our worldview – our perspective. If we want to be negative, then we’ll see events and situations that way. We will look for things that confirms our opinion of a person or a circumstance.
The problem with this is that we lose a little bit of our ability to exercise discernment and use the brains that God gave us. People we don’t like can be right and do good things. People we trust can do bad things or be wrong.
Former President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If I walked on water across the Potomac River, there would be people upset that their president didn’t know how to swim.” L.B.J. understood that many people are oftentimes about as happy or sad, positive or negative as they want to be.
How about us? Are we seeing only what we are looking for or are we open-minded, self-aware, and willing to see other perspectives?
If we are looking for turtles, then that is probably what we’ll find.