I’m Doug Apple...and my heart is on fire. (Luke 24:32)
I was training an intern in the art of digital audio editing.
I said, “You’re going to be doing a lot of zooming in and zooming out.”
“Why?” she said.
“Because you have to zoom in close to make tight cuts,” I said. “But then you have to zoom back out to listen to the edit and make sure it’s right.”
The same is true in graphic design, and video editing: a lot of zooming in and zooming out.
I did the same as a photographer with my trusty old 35mm camera. I’d zoom all the way in on a subject to set the focus, then zoom back out to see the whole picture.
Imagine Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. He had to get up close to paint, but he had to move away to see the whole thing…which is not easy when you’re painting a ceiling that is over 60 feet high!
Speaking of 60 feet high, that’s how big the presidential heads are that are carved into Mt. Rushmore. For him to zoom out, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum had to climb down the mountain!
A lot of zooming in and zooming out…that was my advice for the intern, and that’s my advice for all of us. In life we need to do a lot of zooming in and zooming out.
The old saying is, "Don’t spend your life climbing the ladder of success, only to find that it was leaning against the wrong wall.”
We can get so zoomed in on each rung of the ladder that we never zoom out and see if it’s up against the right wall.
Another old saying is, “They can’t see the forest for the trees.” That’s because they are so focused on individual trees that they never step back to see the forest, or everything that’s outside the forest.
We read about a man like this in the Bible. In Luke 12 Jesus told The Parable of the Rich Fool. The man was so successful he had to build more and more storage units to contain it all. The rich man said to himself in Luke 12:19, “You have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.”
He was very zoomed in on his current success and comfort. But then God lowered the boom on him in verse 20. God said, “Fool! This night your soul will be required of you; then whose will those things be?”
If only the man would have taken some time to zoom out and see the bigger picture, including eternity and God.
In Luke 18 we read about the rich young ruler. Jesus told him to sell his possessions, give the money to the poor, and to follow Him. The man was so zoomed in on his riches, that’s all he could see. He needed to zoom out and see the bigger picture, that he was talking to the King of Kings.
And the King of Kings is talking to us today. Are we too zoomed in on our present life, our present rung on the ladder, our one little tree in the forest?
Psalm 90:12 says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
Second Corinthians 4:18 tells us “…the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”
In Luke 10, Martha was very zoomed in on what seemed so important that day, all the preparations. But her sister Mary had zoomed out to see the big picture, and that was Jesus Himself, the Lord of All, right there in their house.
How can we avoid these mistakes? Yes, we zoom in to take care of details, but then we have to zoom out again to make sure we are on the right track.
Because in life, as in digital editing, we need to do a lot zooming in and zooming out.
May God bless you today.
I’m Doug Apple.
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