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VOLUME I • ISSUE NO. 15

REFRAME IT

The Rock, the Redhead & the Man Who Changed the Caption

A few days ago, we crossed into the biblical year of 5787, and there is something hopeful about looking at a new year before we have lived it. A calendar is a collection of little frames, one day following another, and none of us gets to see the whole strip at once. Yet one painful frame can become an entire story in our minds.

Someone else is chosen. Someone we love prefers somebody else's company. Our work is passed over. We are left out, disappointed or rejected, and hurt begins writing the caption underneath the picture: 

I don't matter. I wasn't good enough. Nobody sees me. This always happens to me.

 Sometimes the feelings we have really are crushing. But what happened and what we decide it means do not have to be the same thing. 

 Beginning again well is learning to recognize the difference, and learning to reframe it.

Gideon understood what it was like to believe the frame in front of him. When we meet him, his country has been terrorized for years and he is hiding what little wheat he has so it won't be taken. He sees his family as insignificant and himself as the least important one in it.

Then the Angel of the LORD appears and calls this frightened, hiding man a

“mighty man of valour.”

Gideon essentially responds, Have You seen what is happening here? Of course He had.

 Gideon could only see himself from inside the story in his own mind; but heaven had a perspective Gideon did not. The man hiding with his wheat would go on to lead just 300 men against an enormous army and free Israel from years of oppression. God did not deny what Gideon was facing. He simply did not agree with Gideon's conclusion about who Gideon was.

Thousands of years later, a boy in Minnesota was growing up with a pencil in his hand and a silly nickname. Charles Schulz was called “Sparky” almost from birth, after Spark Plug, a horse in the popular comic strip Barney Google.

Drawing was what he wanted to do, but there were plenty of frames in his own story suggesting it wasn't going to happen. His high-school yearbook rejected his drawings. Publishers rejected his work. Walt Disney decided not to hire him. Then Sparky fell in love with a red-haired woman named Donna and asked her to marry him.

She chose another man, a rejection that wounded him deeply.

But Schulz had a gift for taking real life, including the parts that hurt, and putting it beneath his pencil. His black-and-white childhood dog Spike, the subject of his first published drawing, helped inspire Snoopy. Donna helped inspire Charlie Brown's Little Red-Haired Girl. His disappointments, insecurities, observations and ordinary human experiences became part of Peanuts. The drawings once rejected for a school yearbook eventually became a strip appearing in more than 2,600 newspapers in 75 countries.

Maybe that is why millions of people recognized themselves in Charlie Brown. Schulz knew how it felt to hope, lose, be embarrassed, be overlooked and try again.

But he also knew that a pencil can do more than make people laugh.

 When A Charlie Brown Christmas was being made in 1965, the producers were concerned about Schulz's insistence that Linus stand on that stage and recite the account of Christ's birth from Luke chapter 2. Schulz stood his ground.

Mendelson later remembered him saying,

“If we don't do it, who will?”

And so, on network television, before millions of homes, Linus told Charlie Brown and everyone watching what Christmas was really about. Schulz later received letters from people thanking him for “preaching through the strips.” The boy who knew rejection had been given an enormous platform, and God was able to use the very human things beneath his pencil to make people smile, feel understood and, at times, point them toward Him.

Then came It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. The children return from trick-or-treating and compare what they received. One by one they announce their treats until Charlie Brown looks into his own bag and says,

“I got a rock.”

Now we understand the rock. We have all had one. Someone else got the candy, the opportunity, the attention, the relationship or the yes we wanted, and comparison immediately offered us a caption.

So bring the hurt to God before you carry its meaning into another year. Forgive your Lucy. Forgive yourself for the times you have been Lucy. Maybe you really did get the rock. But tomorrow brings another square on the calendar, another frame you cannot see yet. God sees beyond the one you are standing in. And here in Beulah, His promises are written everywhere to remind us there is always more to the story.

Reframe it.

Until next Tuesday, may your blessings be double and your burdens be light.

Michelle Driscoll

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And see where He takes you... In Due Time.