The Bigger Picture 🖼🎞

It's Summer ☀ ... as if the heat would ever allow us to forget it for an instant. 🥵

What that means for us this year, is that we are being treated with quite the whirlwind of excitement and drama that typically accompanies the Summer Olympics.

Admittedly, this year does feel a little different for many reasons, but at the same time, it holds true to a lot of the familiar similarities, one in particular that we've come to expect: the excruciating agony and anxiety of those photo finishes... which just in case you're not familiar with the phenomenon is where the officials have to resort to the careful examination of special photography to get a better, focused view of everyone's place at a particular point in the race.

Though these moments can really produce some nail-biting seconds that feel like minutes and minutes that feel like hours, it really doesn't take much for those behind-the-scenes to request and receive that special imagery for examination.

This is of course unlike the days of old, when things were not quite that simple.  One would have to have access to a camera, acquire the film for the camera, load it properly (and carefully), snap the photo and then wind it up to take another.  Then once your roll of film runs out (after maybe 12, 24 or 36 photos... yup, that's all you get), then you have to carefully remove that roll, give it out to your preferred photo shop for them to develop the film into actual printed photographs.

While that's a far cry from what we have now where we can just snap a bajillion photos in an instant on whatever device we have in our hand and immediately look at the pics right away... as Pastor Conrad Reid recently pointed out, there's one thing that hasn't changed... and that's the fact that regardless of whether the photo is physical or digital as soon as the photo is presented, our eyes are instinctively drawn to our place in the picture.

Whether as an individual looking to see how we're looking in the picture, or as a Jamaican invested in assessing our place in a race, we zoom right in... pass everything else that may be going on, to check out what's going on in our section of that photo, asking the questions (though maybe not out loud):  "How are we looking?"  "How did we do?"

Those aren't bad questions at all.  In fact, we should continually perform some self-assessment to ensure that healthy introspection remains a part of our lifestyle... and our walk with God.

It doesn't take much to see the spiritual parallel here.

How often do we, when given the opportunity for introspection, whether through feedback from others or reflection on the Word of God fail to step back far enough to grasp the fullness of what God may be showing or teaching us?

What we definitely should be mindful and wary of, is being so myopic in our inspection of the snapshot of our life that we can't see what else is going on in the wider clipping.

We must ensure that we, first of all, trust God that there is a wider framing than what we may be looking at.  We should realize that God has the ultimate wide-angle lens and He sees and knows things that we simply cannot now see.

Then, second of all, we must trust God that He is in full control and has secured for us a crucial part in his grand plan.

So whenever we're tempted to get pulled into magnifying our own selves or our own circumstances, let us not forget that God is the Master Photographer and He is always the one framing The Bigger Picture.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight”

(Read: Proverbs 3:5-6)