Recently I was going through some digital pictures of all three of my kids, resorting and filing them away in appropriate folders on my computer.
The interesting thing about the pictures has been watching the camera quality improve over the years. We went from a 1.9 megapixel Olympus to a 6.1 megapixel Kodak. More recently we’ve added a 14 megapixel Fuji that was sent to us for review purposes.
Angela still uses the 10-year-old Olympus, and the five-year-old Kodak remains my favorite, even with the new Fuji. With all three of those cameras in use there are times when we have taken pictures of the same thing with two or three of the cameras, just to compare quality. The differences are fascinating.
When I compare images from the Olympus and Kodak side by side, the Kodak’s shots are so much clearer. None of the graininess of the low-resolution pictures from the old Olympus exists on the Kodak shots – at least not until the Kodak images are “blown up” to about 8×10 and beyond. But, then there’s the Fuji. The difference in normal pictures sizes between the Kodak and Fuji isn’t all that noticeable. But, when the image size of the pictures is increased the differences begin to show up.
Sometimes I think our spiritual growth is like that varied picture quality. We start off thinking we are seeing things pretty clearly. But then we grow a little more. When we compare what we did know to what we know now, the differences are pretty stark. We continually grow a little deeper and our vision expands a little wider. Things that we thought were clear to us before gradually become even clearer. Scriptural scopes we thought we grasped broaden even more as we see how passages throughout the Bible are bound together.
There will always be a better camera out there. Improvements come out all the time as technology increases and prices come down. Quality will improve and images will sharpen as we record our lives in ever-higher resolution. In the same way, our spiritual vision should always be sharpening. Even if we’re still seeing the same conceptual image we saw ten years ago, our growth should be helping us to see it in sharper clarity. We should be able to discern more detail. The image should have more depth.
Is your spiritual vision sharper than it was ten years ago? Five years ago? Even last year? If not, it just might be time for a spiritual camera upgrade! Believe me, you’ll be delighted with the change!
Not Quite Ordinary 