Man, it's been a long time in the making, but Video TruthMill is finally here.
When God called me to preach in 2005 it took about a year to get trained up and started with audio podcasting. I had no equipment, no experience, and absolutely no knowledge about how to even get started, but God answered everything in His time through prayer.
Sometime in 2008 I felt God wanted me to move away from audio only and to move into video. Boy oh boy... if I felt that I wasn't at all equipped for audio I knew for certain that I wasn't for video. It entails so much more.
But I began to pray about it and simply told God that if I was indeed hearing from Him correctly that He would have to do it all because I couldn't do any of it. In other words, I did exactly what I had done with the audio podcasting.
In that case I had made up a short list of what I thought I needed to get started and it came to about 1500.00 dollars: quite a bit of money. But I felt it was really what He wanted me to do so I just prayed for His provision. And He came through right to a "T".
Back before the economy tanked and my career would yield the odd bonus here or there, I received a bonus for about twice as much as I needed. I always split those evenly with my wife after taxes, and after I had purchased my new equipment with my half, I had $5 left over for lunch money. What a deal!
But with video, things are quite a bit different. I don't think we as Christians need to go overboard, but I think everything we do in God's service should be accomplished with the idea of glorifying God. I'm not so sure poor quality media glorifies God... I sure don't think so.
So I once again put together a list and it came out to several thousand dollars. I saved up for some of it but there were other things that were just flat out of my reach, even if I saved all of my pennies for years. My only anchor was that this was in fact what God wanted me to do, so I just kept with the idea and learned what I needed as best I could.
I think looking back on it now, God was metering things out to give me time to learn what I needed to learn, and to come to grips with some spiritual things as well. But as it turns out we moved to a new house in the country where I had an outbuilding that now doubles as a video studio. It's nothing fancy, just a foundation with a thin metal shell. I battle wind noise, animal noise, wasps, huge spiders, snakes, freezing cold in the winter and boiling heat in the summer. But I treasure that little hulk of a building because it's from God.
I saved up for some of the stuff, like some high quality lighting from Lowel (check them out online, great stuff if you're in the market for that type of thing), but there were those darned show stoppers still to deal with.
There was no way I could afford a decent high-def camera, or a computer to use for editing, or editing and special effect software. But as it turns out God took care of all that in a variety of ways. The most interesting to me is the camera.
The camera I use is actually very, very inexpensive as these things go, but even at that it was still far out of my reach. Long story short, God provided that camera to me via a friend that had it drop-shipped to my front porch for Christmas. When God blesses, God blesses. In the same kind of way, God provided not one computer but two, not one video editing or VFX package, but several. Some of them I use the most I'd hardly ever heard of. Hmmm... who would have thought God knew what He was doing?
I ended up with way more than I had even dreamed of on my little faith list. God is indeed great. And in hindsight, as is usually the case because of our lack of faith, my little list was really much smaller than what God actually delivered.
But the equipment and self training are really the easy parts of something like this. The spiritual warfare has been, how shall I say..., intense. Now that it seems a particular hurdle has been cleared the pressure is somewhat relieved and I'm in a time of rest, I know that in the future it will kick up again. That's just how these things work.
Anyway, as episodes are completed I'll post a link here in the blog back to the main site at http://www.truthmill.org.
Here's to seeing you next time.
/Scott.
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