If God Has Developed You, You Should Wait for Him To Fix you Too

About  two decades ago, black and white photographs used to be the fad. I am talking about the days you could hardly submit any formal document without a black and white passport gracing one of the pages of the enclosed forms. Those  days marked my early sojourn into the world of photography. Taking shots then required the mastery of focusing which demanded skill and dexterity -not these days that a lot of the focusing can be done automatically. Those days, Yashica,  Praktica and Kodak among others were the major camera manufacturers in the world. Then,  you do not look at the camera in the same direction as your object of focus.  You usually had to look downwards into the camera while it captures the intended image for you. But that is not going to be the crux of this piece of today, this is just to create a background to ease the flow into the meat of the matter.

Pictures looked great in black and white too. The beauty was in the contrast and more often than not, the quality of the prints were used to differentiate professional photographers from the rookies in the industry. The defining contrast between the different shades of black and white will fish you out if you are a genius in the art. Properly chosen background enhanced the contrast between the face of the person and other surrounding background features in the picture. In fact, simply because it was a world of monochrome or various shades of black and white did not serve as an excuse for not producing great black and white prints.

  I  remember for years,  I had always longed to accompany my mum into the darkroom to see how black and white prints were made. I often wonder how the small negatives developed  to something bigger and more beautiful. I usually ponder and found it impossible to understand how those tiny films could be used to produce multiple images and sometimes, magnificent enlarged prints without getting destroyed in the process. I kept disturbing my mum as my curiosity consumed me. I decided not to let her rest until she agreed to my plea.  After myriads of pleas and deluge of promises not to be meddlesome while in the darkroom, she finally yielded to my plea one day.

 On that fateful day  as soon as we were in, mum switched off the  white bulb and switched on the the red one with heavily reduced luminous intensity.  Initially I went blind and could see nothing. After a while , I could pick out the outline of certain objects in the room. I  learnt years later, in Physics class, that the eyes have their ways of adjusting to a varying degree of illumination. Hence, the temporary blindness we experience when we leave a poorly lit room and suddenly find ourselves in abundance of sunlight.

An Enlarger (Courtesy, Wikipedia)

 Okay, agreed I wasn’t going to be troublesome but I had a lot of questions to ask and mum should be ready to answer my barrage of questions.  Of course she was.  And  I asked questions before and after every process. I was young but my innocent but curious mind had an unquenchable  thirst for knowledge.  So I observed that at first, my mum brought light sensitive papers from a container. I remember Ilford was a household name in black and white photographic papers. Now the room is relatively dark but you can actually use a very red electric bulb whose illumination you have to reduce further through graduated electric light regulators.  Technically these electric bulbs are called safelights. They do not cause any visible change on the light sensitive photographic materials.

 So  she brought out the paper and  placed  it under an electrical device popularly  called enlarger. The enlarger houses an electric bulb which acts as a light source to illuminate a negative. A negative is a sheet of transparent film  through which lights are exposed on photosensitive papers. The darkest sides appear lightest   while the lighter sides appear darkest when printed on photographic papers.

Generally, it depends on the transparency of the negative.  The lighter it is,  the shorter it has to be exposed to light from the enlarger, the darker it is the longer it stays under controlled illumination to get the right amount of exposure in order to get fine prints.   I usually wonder how mum knows the right duration for each of the prints but over time as a result of her experience with these things she manages to produce wonderful looking prints.  Immediately after she is done with exposing the photographic paper to light, she dips them into three plastic bowls containing three different  fluids-one of which is water- in succession. The first fluid is a solution containing a chemical usually known in the  photographic  parlance as developer. The time of exposure of the photosensitive  papers in the developing solution requires not only  close  vigilance but  meticulousness and skill. It is the one that develops the image first. The paper is usually blank after the exposure but as soon as it drops into the developer it gradually begins to form until it gets to the right contrast. One has to be careful here and must be quick too because if the paper stays there longer than required the prints become darker than necessary. If the paper remains longer for a given amount of time, the paper ends up turning into black and the image is lost irretrievably.

  Now after you remove the paper  from developer , you rinse in water then dip into another chemical called the  fixing salt. The fixing salt is the one that perfects the image and ensures that further exposure stops on the photographic paper. Once the paper has gone through the fixing salt that is the only time the paper can be taken to normal daylight. Once the printing paper is fixed, the integrity of the picture is guaranteed and secured. The prints and image can be preserved now no matter the intensity of the light.

Now how many times do we allow God to develop us and when he is not through with us we are so much in a haste to go out to the world to show the world the stuff we are made up of. Often, we are overtaken by euphoria, swept away from logical reasoning by excitement heightened by adrenaline pumping in our circulation  system. We feel God is through with us , meanwhile he has the blueprint for our lives.  Our father knows how long we need to remain in the fixing salt. He knows that once we are exposed to lights we have not been prepared for we will be destroyed. So while we think the best has been done on us, he looks at us and shakes his head and says : “ I know you are beautiful the way you are son/daughter, but you are not ready for the world yet. You need to be fixed”

I have gone through many developmental stages in life. I have seen things I had concluded were certain and immutable becoming suddenly uncertain and some plans you thought were sure vanish into thin air like they never existed at all. Developmental times are the various phases in our lives that God decides to deposit gifts, virtues and talents in us. But once we begin to see vestiges of the manifestation of his glory in us we suddenly develop the spirit of haste. We are no longer patient. We begin to feel we cannot afford wait to manifest. Meanwhile God doesn’t reason that way , he is not only giving you the gift , he is also given you the grace to function with the gift and not to fall under the weight of the gift. That is why he will want to fix us.

 It is left for us not to get carried away by just a minor indicator of the fullness of his blessings. We need to develop patience and wait for him to fix us. We need to be ready to wait as long as he want us to be in his fixing salt. The question is how long are we ready to wait for God’s fixing?

NB: This is a post I stumbled upon in one of my long old drafts while looking for something to put up here. I do not know if it is going to make a meaning to someone out there. But it is here already. You have it. Apologies in advance for any typos and grammatical faux pas. Bon Weekend 🙂