Junior high kids stay in place in the frame and stare intently at the camera, raise their hand to read or answer a question, and are breezily compliant. Of course. They can’t kick one another under the table or make a joke to the person next to them.

High schoolers recline in their rooms and fill their video with the blue and green lighting flashing on their ceiling and walls. They are more reluctant to raise a hand than their younger counterparts and look a measure or two less interested in what’s going on. But they’re there, together, and they keep coming back.

The college students are the most unruly. Delighted to see and be seen, they never stop replacing their background with some digital creation of their own, usually a photo from their roll, often one they have photoshopped in some clever way. They are riveted to one another’s performances.

They are delightful and instructive in their own way, all of them. I’m trying to learn from them.

I don’t want to read another editorial. I don’t want to watch another uplifting video. I don’t want to take part in another social media “challenge.”

There’s work to do, though I don’t really want to do that either. I don’t want to organize enrichment activities for my child. I don’t want to cook or clean. I don’t want to go for a walk. I don’t want to watch a movie. I don’t want to Zoom.

I’m doing these things, of course. We all are. Only, the moment is requiring performance minus interest. That’s good, though it doesn’t feel good; doing what is required but not desired is a way of performing some of humanity’s more durable–and valuable–functions: service, sacrifice, learning.

God be with you today.

It’s getting very difficult to read anymore analysis. My mind can’t focus on argument and the making of a case. It all seems persuasive, if only I can bet past the third paragraph, but a sledge of over-used terms and phrases bog me down and I have to look away.

I’m looking to fiction and narrative non-fiction. I have struggled to read fiction my entire adult life; I read to learn–personally, professionally, and politically–so novels have always felt like a luxury. Funny that now they are a lifeline. Station Eleven and The Plague, for starters (they don’t all have to be end-of-the-world stories, I suppose). It is surprising me to discover that the only things that can hold my badly worn attention right now are stories. What’s that about?

Even real stories. There’s an essay in this week’s New Yorker by a guy who moved to Lyon, France, and apprenticed under a baker that kept me up past my bedtime. Reading it prompted me to email someone I know who did something similar and wrote a book about it, just to recommend the essay to someone.

Recommending books and essays is a better use of my speech than the more natural, for me, alternatives of the moment: complaint, speculation, and the all-purpose shrugging of the shoulders. And who knew stories could be so important?

Literally from one day to the next, the work we’re all doing changed. Running youth groups on Zoom, recording Facebook Live devotions, livestreaming worship from living rooms–these are not different ways to do the same things we were doing before. They are different things. They are the things we should be doing, because they are the things the moment demands. But they’re different things.

I hope when this is over that we can resist the urge to replace what we were doing before with what we’re doing now. Some of those things we were doing before needed a shakeup and serious scrutiny, but I fear that these digital alternatives will appear the obvious solution. I hope we can find the value in Zoom and livestreaming that is durable and persist with those elements to supplement what we were doing before. That might require letting some of those older things go, and I hope we were thinking about letting them go before the crisis.

Supplement feels more fruitful than replace.

I haven’t checked the weather report for days. It’s as if I forgot there was such a thing.