A Turtle named Ed

We took the girls on a wild adventure vacation last summer. In our journey we spent a couple of hours at the Sea Turtle Center on Jekyll Island. It is now one of our favorite places to visit. If you have never been, you get to take a tour of the hospital and a guide walks around to the tanks and tells you about the turtles they are currently caring for. Ed was my favorite. Ed was found originally stranded on Cumberland Island, GA. She was brought to the hospital at Jekyll and evaluated. She had an obstruction that was pressing on her lung. The lung was not inflating and deflating properly and so she could not dive to get food to eat. She was rehabilitated and was released off the coast of Jekyll only she would not go. She just looked at the staff and would not go. They did everything to get her in the water and she would not go. So a few weeks later they took her by boat out in the ocean and basically sent her on her way. She was finally released and the staff and volunteers were so happy. In May she was found off the coast of St. Augustine. She was floating. They brought her back. See I really think in the year she spent at Jekyll she developed a bond that she was not ready to let go of just yet. She was a young turtle when she was found. So, young that they named her Ed because they had not determined if she was a boy or girl until they did a CT scan and saw her ovaries. So at such a young age she formed a bond with her caregivers. They became her family. They loved her and took care of her. She just kept coming back to her family. She did not want to go that first time and she probably would not have jumped off that boat. She wanted to be with her family at the Turtle Center and GOD found a way to get her back there. She now is waiting for a permanent place at an aquarium. I guess the staff figured Ed prefers spending time with people rather than a big, huge ocean of fish. The staff and volunteers found her quirky, but I related to her. She stands for all that GOD wants for us. He wants us to be a part of His family. I think about Ed and how she swam in the big blue sea probably hoping to get back to her little pool at the turtle center. She had no idea how to get there she just swam until she could no longer swim. I wonder if she just floated off the coast of Jekyll for hours wondering if the turtle center boat was coming back to get her. I am sure turtles have feelings too. I wonder if she felt abandoned. You know most of the turtles there probably feel captured and want to get back to their life in the open sea, but baby Ed did not like what the sea had to offer. She wanted to be with her hospital family. For her the ocean world was way too big for a little green sea turtle to take on alone. I wonder how a baby in an orphanage feels on that first day they find themselves in an orphanage or abandoned on the street or in a bus station. An infant probably only knows how cold they are at that age, but a toddler or older child knows that their whole world has been turned upside down. I met a couple that adopted their daughter at five years old. She was beautiful and I met her when she had only been home about a month. I spoke to her in some broken Mandarin because her parents knew none. She shyly answered my questions as she partially hid behind her new mother. I was in awe of her ability to bond so quickly and to trust so wholeheartedly. Her mother told us when she left the room that at the age of 3 she was abandoned at a large train station in Beijing. They have no clue where she is originally from. They were told by the citizens they met in Beijing that she was definitely not from there. The Chinese have different features and different dialects of Mandarin in every region and those citizens in Beijing knew she was not from around there. I am sure when this little one found herself in a sea of people at that train station she felt a lot like Ed. She was in a big train station and all she wanted was to get back to the family that had taken care of her over the last three years. GOD has great plans for this little girl because the possibilities of what could have happened to her in such a huge place are truly endless. Besides being kidnapped, she could have fallen onto the tracks, or been knocked down by the sea of people coming on and off the trains. GOD does have plans for her and what a blessing she is to her new parents. Five years from now her memories will reflect the love she has in her new family and the prayers sent up to bring her into their lives. Ed the sea turtle was born somewhere on an ocean coast, but that was not what she knew as home. She knew the hospital pool as her home and that was where she longed to be. I am sure this precious child has memories of many things, but for those weeks before I met her she had the love she had been looking for since the day she was left at a train station all alone. I think of all the aged out and aging out children in orphanages around the world. I know they all seek the same thing, LOVE. God is LOVE and that is why we all seek it. I pray that these older children find the LOVE they are seeking in the Father and not in drugs, alcohol or prostitution. I pray that GOD will protect them from the evil of this world and help them find the LOVE they seek in the right places. I know Ed is swimming in her pool right now at Jekyll. She has no clue that they are seeking a new family for her at some aquarium. I hope Ed is happy in her new adoptive home wherever it may . I hope Ed finds the love she found at Jekyll that kept calling her from the sea. Jekyll calls me once every couple of years, too and every time I am there I feel like its home at least for a few days.