Cropping?
Yes, cropping! A few
days before we had arrived, my grandfather had attended an antique car show at
a nearby airport. Being a huge antique car buff, he took a lot of pictures of
all the cars. That’s fine! But what really stuck me was how much better a photo
became once it was cropped. It may have been an okay photo to begin with, but
besides the car (the object my grandfather was photographing) there were all sorts
of different distractions. There were people standing and sitting in the weirdest
postures and in the weirdest of places; lengthy tables and other cars that were
halfway cut off in the shot.
But it was amazing the difference once my grandfather took
that little “crop” tool on his computer and got rid of all those distractions.
Now the main focus was on the car—the original object of his photo—and he had
turned the photo from being okay to being superb. I watched him do this, too;
time and time again this happened. Every picture that he cropped turned out ten
times better than it had originally been. And all that had happened was getting
rid of some distracting pixels.
You know, that experience has got me thinking. Our lives are
a lot like those photos! We have so many
things going on in our lives that if a photograph could be taken that represent
our lives, I have a premonition that there wouldn’t even be a subject! There
would just be an absolute ton of elements all crowded in and jumbled…God would
probably be in there, but I doubt that he’d be the subject.
But there’s a problem with that.
God demands first place in our lives. It’s not an option. As
Christians, we need to make God first place in all that we do. In our photo illustration
above, that means putting God in the center of everything; putting the
spotlight on Him and making Him the one and only Subject of our photos. That’s hard to do—there’s so many other
things we gotta do in life—but let me tell you a little story to illustrate
this point.
Perhaps you’ve heard of this illustration before. It’s one
that I read about in a magazine years and years ago, and it was said that this
could be a good illustration for a children’s story. I’ve never told it as a
children’s story, but I have remembered it. Here goes:
When you go to give the children’s story, take a few items
along with you. You’ll want to take a
jar, plus plenty of stones that are both large and small. When you give the story, inform the kids that
you need to get all the stones into the jar. The little stones represent all
the cares of this world, while the big stones represent the important stuff of
this life, such as God. First put in the little stones. They fit, but now try
to get all the big stones in the jar. Some of them fit, but not all. Tell the
kids that you are going to try it again, first putting in the big stones. So you do; after all the big stones are in
(they all fit) you insert the little stones. Miracle of miracles, they all fit!
Why? Because they occupy all the spaces
left by the big stones. In other words, they fit into the nooks and crannies.
The important point to make here is that your goal—getting all the stones in
the jar—only worked when you put the big stones in first.
The obvious application is that our lives will only work
when we put God in first. You may be like me sometimes, wanting God but having
so many other things that must get done before Him. But no. That’s not how it
works. In fact, that’s a recipe for disaster! We must make God first place in
our lives. In terms of our cropping
illustration earlier in this devotional, that’d be similar to cropping out all
the unnecessary distractions and making God the subject of your photograph.
“And God spoke all
these words:… “You shall have no other gods before me.”” --Exodus 20:1, 3
It really is the best for us to put God in first place in
our lives. With Him in first place, in center stage, everything else will fall
into place. You may not believe it, but it’s true. Make God the subject of your photo--your
life--today!
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