Green screens. What’s a green screen? They’re used all the time these days but you generally never see them. That’s because they’re the colored background or digital page that can be put in the background of a football game, weather report, news report, Zoom call or other digital setting.
Right now it looks like I’m in the mountains somewhere but actually I filmed this video sitting in my basement in front of a green screen. Then I added the mountain view on top of the green screen background. Without the green screen the background wouldn’t look that great.
So the cool part is that with a green screen, you can make it look like you’re almost anywhere or doing something that you’re not really doing. Green screens can be used for very serious graphics or just to have some fun.
You can actually buy your own green screen set-up pretty inexpensively or just find a piece of green material and put it up behind the pics you’d like to edit. It all depends upon how much quality you want in the results.
But oh, one more technical warning. If you use a green screen and wear all green, you’ll disappear.
However, recently I got thinking about this idea of a green screen in terms of everyday life. With a green screen we can change the background behind us, right? I’m pretty sure there are times when most if not all of us wish we could change our background or at least the impact of it in some way.
Maybe we came out of a very poor home and never had much. To this day, our experiences shaped how we respond, react and live much of our life. We grew up believing that because we didn’t have many advantages that we are now handicapped and can only do so much as adults.
Perhaps we now spend so much time and emotional effort making sure that we and our family always have enough no matter what. But we can’t just relax and enjoy it all because we fear being really needy again.
Or our background has a lot of personal mistakes in it. We made unwise decisions, took on habits and tendencies that were harmful more than helpful and rebelled against everyone and everything when we needed to listen to wisdom a lot more.
It’s possible that we were in a Christian home but it was so strict, so rigid, so driven by doing and very little by living for Jesus. So today we’re still cautious and even angry about the perspective we grew up with concerning faith.
Our background can’t change, but can we? And the good news is that we can? That’s what faith in Jesus is all about. When we trust Christ as Savior we become a new person, we’re born again into a new family and all of our mistakes are forgiven.
In other words, God puts a new background; the old has gone, the new has come.” We get to begin a life as a baby in Christ with a new background, a new picture on our green screen.
Instead of being poor economically, we’ve been made rich in faith and we can do what we can to provide for our family now, but that goal no longer drives us in the way it used to.
Our personal mistakes are forgiven and now we have Christ living in us and His Spirit working through us to live in wisdom and be guided by the Bible, God’s Word, not our demand to somehow always look good. Acts 10:43, “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through His name.”
You get a new picture on your green screen.
You grew up with a tainted picture of faith, religion not relationships. Okay, now you have the privilege of a new relationship, the love of a caring Father who cares about you as his child, not merely a slave. A new picture on your green screen.
What’s does your background picture look like? Want it changed? As a Christ follower, it’s already changed. Start everyday with that new pic behind you and trash the old one. It’s image will still crop up now and then and when it does mentally and emotionally erase it and thank God again for the new image.
If you haven’t joined God’s family, you can be born again into it today. Just ask God to forgive you of all your sin (selfishness) and tell Him you accept what Jesus did to die and rise again so you like all of us could enter His family.
In that moment you can start a new life with a new picture on your green screen, with a new background that you’ll never lose.
Just don’t wear green.
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