Many interesting things happened during the making of The Journey. Some events were humorous, some were educating, and some reminded me of important things about God, His church, and our spiritual walk in general. The story I’m going to tell now took place during post production and is one of the most important things that I think I learned the whole production.
Shooting had been over for about a month—maybe a month and a half, but we still hardly had any editing done. We had imported everything to the hard drive and grant it, that was a big accomplishment, but I had hoped to be all done before the end of September and it was already October. Things were complicated because we did not own the main computer we were using and someone else owned the other computer. It was tough to put everyone’s schedules together and make it work to get the movie finished. My family and I were frustrated and didn’t know if we should try something else or wait and be patient. It got so bad, I was ready to throw in the towel and give up. I just did not want to deal with it anymore! Of course I knew I wasn’t really going to give up, but my reason was that I remembered all the families who had been a part of it and thought of how upset they’d be with me if all their hard work was wasted. I will also admit that I felt like it was necessary to have me there to complete the project or else it would never get done. Well, things started working out and the Lord was answering our prayers beyond what we hoped for and we hit the editing hard. However; God had not finished teaching me His important lesson yet. One of our first hard days of editing I admitted to the editing team that I had been ready to give up on the whole project. I wasn’t sure what the response would be, but one that I got surprised me. Our technical director said, “You know, if you would have quit, it would have taken me a while to finish, but after a long time I would have come to you and said, ‘Here you go. Here is The Journey.’” I thought that was pretty cool, but it wasn’t until later that I fully appreciated the statement. Sometime later that day I was thinking about what the technical director said and God almost audibly said, “The point is that this is MY project that I chose to use you for. You can quit or you can keep going, but I am going to complete this project whether you’re a part of it or not.” That may sound firm, but it was the most loving thing for me at that moment and was exactly what I needed to hear. I was ready to move on after that, and I did not consider quitting for the rest of the project.
This story reminds me of a quote from Thomas Edison:
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
God gives us work to do for His kingdom and He wants us to follow through with it, but the encouraging thing about it is that He doesn’t leave us to do it alone. He is there the whole time and HE is the one who completes the work. That is why God gets all the glory and we get the amazing reward of seeing Him work through us in spite of, our weaknesses, our failures, and our doubts.
