Fly Turtles and Overloaded Life Rafts

“The flower said I wish I was a tree, the tree said I wish I could be a different kind of tree. The cat wished that it was a bee, the turtle wished that it could fly really high into the sky, over roof tops and then dive deep into the sea. And in the sea there is a fish, a fish that has a secret wish, a wish to be a big cactus with a pink flower on it.”

So tonight I was laying in bed listening to music (with my head phones on so as not to disturb my sleeping wife) and I was struck by the lyrics of this song. They seemed to blend together with some things that have been hanging around my heart, but never really become clear enough to put to words. So I am going to take a rambling and likely ill-fated stab at it…

A lot of what has been hanging around my heart has to do with life rafts. I’ve been reading a book by Donald Miller and he talks about our need to draw our understanding of who we are from outside ourselves. That we are created in such a way that our identity is intended to be drawn from God, but most of us, being in various states of self- imposed distance from God, have turned to drawing our identity from the people around us. The result is we live our life like we are on an overcrowded life raft, always comparing ourselves to the people around us, never wanting to be at the bottom of the totem pole, because that person gets thrown overboard. We are constantly basing our self-worth on acceptance from and comparison to other people.

Great, so what does that have to do with flowers, and trees, and fish that want to be cacti? Good question. I’m not sure I have a good answer. But it may have something to do with the fact that I am realizing more and more that this desire to be cool, to be accepted, to be in a firm position in the life raft pecking order, keeps me in an odd state of dissatisfaction with who I am, where I am, and what I am doing with my life. It feels like every day I look around me and see people who are so creative and talented and brilliant and I think, “What am I doing here?! I am not even in the same stratosphere as these people. How long before they figure that out?” And then I talk to friends about all the amazing places God is taking them and experiences he is putting them through and I long for those to be my experiences. I think to myself, “What am I doing wrong that all of these things are someone else’s life, not mine.” In it all I feel myself being pulled toward the edge of the life raft because I don’t think I am a dynamic and exciting personality, and I am not on the front lines of global justice issues, and a hundred other reasons why I don’t measure up to the people I know and the other people they know. My move to the edge of the life raft sets off this dialogue in my head that takes me places like…if you could just learn to interject more esoteric wit into your conversations, or find the right counter culture authors (or song lyrics) to quote, or learn to play the accordion, then you would be who you want to be.

Here’s the thing, I know God wants me to be changing. And I think that some of my dissatisfaction with who and where I am is because I am not all of who God created me to be. How could I be if I am looking around the life raft for my identity? I am a flower that wants to be a tree, not knowing that there is a fish somewhere that wants to be a flower. So instead of letting God reform me into who he wants me to be, I put all of my effort into trying to become who he wants someone else to be. All that effort to be someone else seems ridiculous to me. I just wish that it didn’t feel like anything else would send me swimming.