Editor’s note: John DeYoung is FRCS’s Director of Generosity and Film Teacher
100 Frames
Thirty frames a second.
That’s what it takes to make a life on screen feel alive. Thirty stills, stitched so fast the eye stops seeing the seams and just sees motion, just sees the story.
Here’s the question I can’t shake: If someone pulled 100 random frames from your life — just three seconds of footage, scattered across your years — would they know your mission, your vision, and who you actually belong to?
Not the highlight reel. Not the baptism, the mission trip photo, the worship set with your hands raised and the lighting just right. I mean the raw footage. The b-roll. The frames nobody was pointing a camera at. The footage nobody’s grading.
Every filmmaker knows the real work isn’t the hero shot. It’s the thousands of unglamorous frames in between — the ones that never make the trailer. In our lives, that includes the line at the DMV; the reply to the email that annoyed you; the tip you left; the way you talked about your coworker when she wasn’t in the room. That’s your footage too.
Paul didn’t say “run the race for the applause at the finish.” He said run it like you mean it — every stride disciplined, every frame intentional, because a prize is waiting that doesn’t rust or fade (1 Corinthians 9:24-25). He wasn’t talking about one dramatic sprint. He was talking about thirty frames a second, for the length of a whole life.
And Hebrews doesn’t tell us to look up occasionally. It says fix your eyes — lock focus — on Jesus, the one who authored the story and is still directing it, all the way through the pain, for the joy on the other side (Hebrews 12:1-2).
Locked focus doesn’t waver when the scene gets boring. That’s the whole point.
The Frames We Cut
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable.
We tend to show up big when the world’s watching. We’ll post the mission trip. We’ll show up for the moment that has an audience built in — because visibility feels like courage, even when it costs us nothing.
But will we show up in the frame nobody’s filming?
The apology text at 11pm that costs your pride and nobody will ever screenshot. The conversation with the hard coworker where you choose truth instead of the easy exit. The moment you could stay quiet and safe, or say the thing that might get you labeled — too much, too religious, too different — and you say it anyway, because it’s true and it’s kind and it’s His.
That’s the footage that gets cut. Not because it’s unimportant — because it’s unwitnessed. For some reason we’ve quietly decided that unwitnessed doesn’t count. But it counts. Jesus never once said “well done, good and viral servant.” He said faithful — faithful with little, entrusted with much (Matthew 25:21, Luke 16:10). The Kingdom isn’t advanced in the viral frame. It’s built one obscure, unnoticed, unrewarded frame at a time.
Zechariah told a discouraged people not to despise the day of small beginnings (Zechariah 4:10) — and we still need that word, because our culture has trained us to despise anything that won’t get a like.
Directing the Whole Reel
So — back to the 100 frames.
If they were pulled at random — not the ones you’d choose, not the ones with good light — would your mission survive the edit? Would the throughline still read: this person belongs to Jesus and is spending their one life on His Kingdom, not their own name?
Or would there be gaps? Frames where you cut away because you were scared of who was watching. Frames where the compelling story you claim to believe went dark the second there was no crowd to see it hold.
Living for Christ was never a highlight reel. It’s a continuous shot. No cuts, no retakes, no “we’ll fix it in post.” Every single frame — the seen and the unseen, the brave and the boring, the ones with an audience and the ones with none — is either being spent for the Kingdom or spent on yourself. There’s no neutral footage.
Colossians doesn’t say “work hard when it’s visible.” It says: whatever you do, do it for the Lord and not for people (Colossians 3:23) — which means the frame with zero witnesses is the truest test of who you’re actually filming for.
So don’t wait for the scene with the crowd. Don’t save your courage for the moments that come with an audience. Roll camera on the ordinary ones. Let your eyes stay locked on the only Director whose opinion outlasts the edit.
Thirty frames a second. Every day. Nobody’s cutting this one for time. Run the race. Keep your eyes on the prize. And don’t you dare cut the frame just because no one’s watching.
