From the Pastor

“I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:6).

Under-development

Pastor Dave Somewhere on a shelf, in a basement, in a home of people who do not know my name, there sits a box camera. It is black, just a few inches on each side, with a lens in the center of its face and a small mirrored viewfinder on two sides. Somewhere over the years it got sold in a garage sale for a buck or two with film still in the camera. It is just a box with a cardboard handle, but it is a very special box. You see, in it is my childhood. I am in that box, in black and white.

In an age of digital photography, where phones take pictures, my idea of a crinkle-edged black and white glossy print seems oddly worthy of Fred Flintstone. Back then, we were less used to viewing our own likenesses and some never got comfortable with the idea and thus, frowned in every picture. But I was fascinated with the idea that a bit of time could be frozen and held in your hand. In a picture you were always on vacation, always at the dinner table next to your uncle Frank, always smiling, always twelve years old. You were stuck. But you didn’t care.

Many of us look now in the mirror wondering where the person in the old photos has gone. We are not smiling, or on vacation, or twelve any more. Uncle Frank has been dead for decades. But here we are and the world is much less ‘black and white’ than it was. What in the world is happening? Where did the person we once know, go? The answer is ‘nowhere.’ He or She is still there, stuck. The good thing about that aging face in your mirror is, you’re not.

Like the old box camera still holding unused film of me as a boy, we want to believe that the true ‘us’ is being held in reserve somewhere. There in that perfect container we are perfect, smiling, relaxed, healthy and trim. There, we hope, God keeps a record of us at our best. But, we are more than an instant of our lives. We are people called to live ‘whole lives.’ The true picture of us is still being developed.

This may disappoint you. Maybe the present ‘snapshot’ of life you’re living isn’t catching you at your best. But what we must see is that God, and the ever-developing act of believing in Him, is constantly alive and full; ever changing but always the same. A little like us. Don’t miss the point of this. This means that even in your “less-than-perfect present tense” God is at work in you, always developing.

God overflows the page of our small picture of life. Faith draws us outside of the borders of the print and bids us to peer around the corners of our current confinement to see that there is much more in store for us than we can see and more than our past could ever have imagined. After all our sighs of longing to regain a world confined to three by five inches, your present moment is bigger.
The picture, your picture, is still in the camera, still being shot, still being developed.

So, smile!

Pastor Dave

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