WEEK THREE: DEVELOP IN THE DARK

When I was in high school, I took a photography class. The class was designed to teach you the entire process from the shot set-up all the way to the final photo print. Now, this was before the age of digital photography where you could send your picture straight from the camera to a printer. Everything was shot on film that had to be developed and processed so that you could print a photograph. To do that process required a darkroom because all of the steps for printing a color photograph need absolutely no light (or almost no light). The film would have to be removed from the film canister, then placed in a cylinder that was light tight and processed with the proper chemicals to “develop” the images on the film, producing what was called a negative. That negative would then be placed into a device that would allow you to pass light through the negative onto a photo paper, exposing the image onto the paper. The paper was then put into a developing solution that would bring the image to life so that you had your finished photograph! It was a long and sometimes tedious process, and we had to practice over and over again so that when we developed the film, the negatives would be correctly exposed and we could get the photos we wanted.

However, there is something unique about the negatives. If you were to look at them by themselves, you would notice that the image was correct but the colors were inverted. This is a necessary step because if they were not inverted, the colors would have been wrong when printed. But to a novice who did not understand this process, the picture would just look incorrect.

Life can often be like this. We have an idea of what we want it to look like, but the picture comes out differently than what we thought or hoped. It is as though we only see our life as the negative and not as what the final product will look like. But what if we started changing our perspective on the negative? 

In our Lifehouse 101 course we talk about our FORM, the unique way that God has formed and shaped each of us. In that discussion the “O” stands for opportunities. Now for most of us, the idea of an opportunity only represents the positive events in our life, but when we discuss it in 101, we talk about how every experience is an opportunity. Whether difficult or easy, an achievement or a setback, every experience we have in life is an opportunity to grow and develop.

Just like the multiple steps of the development process for film, our lives have many steps. Sometimes God needs us to experience the “negatives” of life so that he can develop us into the perfect image that he designed us to be. It is simply up to us as to how we view it. Even when life looks inverted and the colors may seem off, know this: God is in the process of developing you to be everything that he wants you to be, and it is through this process of development that we grow closer to him.