The Camera Doesn’t Lie

The Camera Doesn’t Lie

Few would suspect that I worked my way through college as a television news reporter. For four hours each Monday through Friday I was a journalism student, then for another four I was a fledgling journalist, writing, interviewing, taping, doing stand-ups, and editing B-roll for the local evening news.

I got the job because I thought I was interviewing for a different one. The flyer posted in the journalism-school offices said “news writer.” I was too green to realize that a news writer at a television station might actually have to read—on camera—whatever news she wrote!

I was shy. (Still am, somewhat.) When I was asked by my interviewer to read on camera, I was too stunned to refuse. So I read, got out of there as fast as I could, and went home and told my roommate how embarrassed and humiliated (and mistaken about the true nature of the job) I had been. To my great shock, they called four hours later and said, “You’re hired.”

I only did news part-time in college. I never learned to love the camera, and truthfully, it didn’t love me much either. I gave up any ideas I might have harbored about becoming a Today Show coanchor and decided my journalism calling was definitely in print, or at least on the production end of the camera.

Years later, circumstances put me in front of the camera again. I worried. I fretted. I tried to remember if I have a “best” side. (I’m pretty sure I don’t.) And for one excruciating afternoon, I recalled what it was like to look into the eye of the camera and try not to let my discomfort show. Those few hours reminded me of what I never liked about the camera: it doesn’t lie. Not even a little. Impartially focused on its object, it simply renders what it sees.

And I remembered, too, that I live 24-7 before the truth-telling lens of one who never blinks. His inscrutable gaze misses nothing. His piercing eyes see past my carefully tended surface. And here’s the hidden joy of what would otherwise be terror to me: he forgets nothing but the sin that I’ve confessed. And all that he sees, he loves.

As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.

Psalm 103:12, NASB