Layers

When I was in elementary school, we went to Focus on the Family headquarters one day on a field trip. Headquarters were in California at the time…this was back before they developed all of the cool stuff, three story slides and ice cream shops…but it was still a very welcome break from pages of math problems and underlining subjects and double-underlining verbs.

I remember seeing Dr. Dobson in the recording studio through a glass. If I remember though, they were doing some kind of a broadcast in Spanish.

About the only other thing I remember about the tour was something the guide showed us about the printing process. She took one of the magazine covers and demonstrated to us the way it was actually printed. She had a transparency that showed each of the colors—black, cyan, magenta, and yellow. When you laid them all on top of each other, it made an impressive cover for a Brio magazine. But if you took them off, layer by layer, the picture lost its depth, its balance, its shape, and its attractiveness. And if you looked at each transparency separately—you saw no picture at all. Only red, blue, or yellow blobs of color randomly spread around on a page like something a two-year old might do with a can of paint.

For some reason, the Lord brought this image to my mind on an inordinately bad day that came at the end of a difficult week. Each of the layers could represent an aspect of life. The black layer is kind of like the mundane, practical, ordinary side of life. It gives us shape, but no depth. It is taking out the garbage, scrubbing the bathroom floor, buying groceries, and washing dishes. It’s the stuff we do to maintain; the part of ourselves that gets consumed just to keep things running smoothly.

The first layer of color would be the problems, frustrations, difficulties, and just plain bad days. Lost jobs. Annoying family members. Ungrateful people that you’ve helped. Lost keys. Delayed flights. And much, much bigger problems. If you look at this layer by itself, it looks absolutely shapeless. A waste of ink. No attractiveness. No sense. And even laid against the black and white layer, there is little to convince you that there was much of a point.

The next layer, I would say, is the “good stuff” in life. The fun times with friends. The blessings. Vacations. Gifts. It’s clean sheets, and brownies and ice cream, trips to Europe to see bullfights and castles. This would be the layer of color that we look forward to. Walks on the beach. Dove bars. Motorcycle Rides.

True, taken by itself, this layer doesn’t amount to anything either. Although it is fun while it lasts, you can’t just have this layer of life. Your sheets would not be clean and your brownie pans would still be in the kitchen sink. You wouldn’t be able to pay for the trip to Spain, and you would have no one to go with because truly good relationships are built not only in fun times but in the mundane; and they are tested and strengthened in the tough times. But, even so, we are thankful for this layer and hope that the picture we’re making happened to need a lot of that particular color.

We’re going to skip a long description of last layer for now because it really deserves its own little essay and because I want to get to the point.
Someone looking at the finished product will likely have no appreciation for all of the layers of color that went into it. They see a girl skateboarding on the front of a magazine (Okay, so this was twenty some years ago). It has color, it has depth, but the casual observer doesn’t really notice.

But if you took one of those layers out, they would notice. Even the layer of problems and troubles that we would so happily just skip is serving its purpose to turn your character into just the right shade. Take it out and it would be like an old movie with the whole thing tinted blue. Really irritating.

What looks like random blobs of color are actually precisely the right intensity, not too dark to take over the page, not too light so as to prevent the right color from being mixed. They are also precisely shaped – going right up to the lines that they intended to fill, but no farther. It is perfect, exactly the way the artist designed it when he was turning an empty white page into a work of art.

I took the time to write this down because sometimes we need “standing stones” or memorials in our lives that show us God is at work. God had his children set up pillars at specific times so when they looked back, they would be reminded that God was there and He was faithful.

If we look only at the “bad” layer, we can easily produce enough evidence to convince ourselves that life is a random, pointless mess. But if we look at that same layer for what it is, we realize that there is no need to change it, but to let it come and look forward to seeing just what God will do with the finished design.