I am fairly certain that at some point in your life, you have seen a turtle meandering across the road. Perhaps you even put on your flashers and got out to help it. What I am amazed at is the advice that if you move a turtle, you should move it in the direction it was headed. Turtles have a compass. One really good site I found information about this is:

https://www.turtleguardians.com/2020/07/turtles-know-where-they-are-going/

Quoting from this article:

If you are familiar with turtles and practiced in the art of helping them across roads, you are probably aware that turtle conservation groups and experts urge rescuers to move turtles across the road in the direction they are facing when found. Why is this? When you find a turtle crossing a road coming from a lush wetland, heading towards a dry rocky outcrop, doesn’t it make the most sense to turn it around and place it back in the wetland? Even though your natural instincts might tell you to turn a travelling turtle around and put them in a more “turtle-friendly” habitat, this will actually result in the turtle having to cross the road again when they inevitably turn around to head back the way they were going. To understand why turtles will turn back around if you take them off course, you need to know how turtles navigate.

Turtles are excellent navigators within the areas they are familiar with, ie. their “home ranges.” These home ranges include their yearly nesting site (if female), their overwintering grounds, and the wetlands they frequent during their active season. In the early years of their lives turtles will create ‘mental maps’ of their home areas, and it appears that as turtles age they lose this ability to create new mental maps (Caldwell and Nams 2006). Adult turtles tend to rely on their internal compass to navigate through their home range that they know well and have previously “mapped.”

So what do turtles’ mental maps and internal compasses have to do with always making sure to help them across roads in the direction they are facing? Well, everything! Because turtles are such good navigators, when you find them crossing a road, they are heading some where specific – don’t think for a second they are just wandering or confused!! They know where they are going – even if they are heading somewhere that seems to you like poor turtle habitat.

Now, let’s apply the turtles’ mental compasses to our lives as Christians. We can certainly learn from them how to keep our lives on course and keep traveling in the right direction, even when a well-meaning person (or even a temptation) gets us off course by moving us away from our destination. Our journey is one that does not take a few hours and one in which we can put the address into our GPS and just follow it. No, our journey is a spiritual one and to arrive at our ultimate destination, i.e. heaven with our Father, we have to stay focused. Our compass is God’s Word and the more we have it inside of us, the more likely we are to stay on course and not deviate from God’s plans for our lives. Like the turtle, others may try to “help” us and give us advice that is not Biblically based, so it is not sound advice that we should be taking. They are trying to move us in a direction in which we should not be going. So, what are we to do? Stay in God’s Word! When in doubt, pray and consult God’s Word. God is leading us in the right direction if we just follow. He has gifted turtles with the ability to know their home range. He has gifted us with His word so that we can stay on track and keep moving towards our eternal home.