I heard from a childhood friend that my house was a safe haven for him when we were kids and I didn’t even know it. That my house was a safe haven for anyone during those years is surprising to hear, since my older brother was always stoking conflict with everyone. And yet there it is.

The experience you have of your home is not the same experience that others have. We know this in the bad way; everything-looks-good-from-the-outside-but-everyone-is-miserable is a trope mined by dozens upon dozens of weeknight drama series and Oscar contenders (see: American Beauty).

But we should also know it in the good way. Maybe when our home is disappointing our expectations for peace and harmony it’s meeting a neighbor’s in a way that is saving their life.

Yesterday I was seen by a doctor, a resident (I’m fine), who made a confident diagnosis and prescription, then instructed me to wait for a consult with the attending physician. Decades older than the resident, the attending took 30 seconds to reverse his diagnosis and prescribe something completely different.

I was grateful.

The resident wasn’t wrong, exactly, as far as I could tell from the way his attending explained the alternate diagnosis. The attending recommended a different method, a different philosophy of treatment, a different strategy, based on decades of experience the resident doesn’t have yet. That’s to my benefit.

I would have benefited from an attending when I was new to ministry. I probably still would.

What could you say if you didn’t have to shout? If your voice didn’t need to reach the back of the sanctuary, and if there weren’t a distance of several feet between you and the first set of ears to hear what you’re saying, how could you convey your message?

Video collapses the distance between you and your audience. Since we’ve been leading worship from an empty sanctuary over a livestream, my colleagues and I have had to learn the skill of welcoming and praying and preaching to a camera and not to the back of the room. Something of the immediacy of the event has been lost, but something has surely been gained as well. Our task now is to learn how to take advantage of that gain.

For a master class on it, watch Michelle Obama.

I dread more than I used to. The virus, the post office, deadlines: they’re all contributing to a constant uneasy feeling that, some days, approaches despair. I’ve never experienced anything like it.

Dread is not necessary, of course. The wherewithal to check in with ourselves and to check out all these sources peppering us with bad news is especially critical in times like this. It’s worth asking: if I’m immobilized by dread right now, who benefits?

Yet, it’s not all in our heads. Things are legitimately bad right now, and they’re much worse for many, many other people than they are for me. The trends don’t look favorable and the leadership is making a show of its disregard. This is no time to put on a happy face.

A brave face, though? That feels more like it. Let’s take courage from the examples of those women and men who have it the hardest as well as the ones who came before, who endured war and famine, and pestilence with resolve and character. I think they dreaded plenty; they knew the score. But their dread did not defeat them.

All this week I’m meeting with my classmates and faculty from the Doctor of Ministry program I started last year. This is our annual “residential” week, but, as you can guess, it will be “residential” only to the degree that we’re all going to be in our own residences–Chicago, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Michigan, Seattle, and San Jose.

This feels like a good time to be in school. Things are changing in ways we didn’t predict and on a scale we can’t estimate very well, and systems of education are directly affected. I’m glad I’m in one for it all, to experience the effects first hand and to (ahem) learn how to adapt to them, maybe even how to take advantage of them.

People were doing education online before Coronavirus.

A pastor in California told his congregation that “the world does not understand the importance of the church” to justify its resumption of in-person services, with singing, in defiance of a state order.

The church is called to be important for the sake of the world, yet gathering in large groups, unmasked, collectively singing, imperils the health of the world in a very well-established way.

To this pastor I would say: it’s more that the world does not understand your view of the church’s importance, which appears in this moment dangerously self-centered and shortsighted. As a fellow church leader, I’m with the world on this one.

The Douglas Rushkoff insight about the biases of technologies has stayed with me, bubbling in the back of my consciousness, since I first heard it, and it has come to a boil during Coronavirus and all of our sudden dependence on Zoom.

What is the bias of Zoom?

I don’t mean Zoom the company, although, as a tech start-up in a capitalist economy, Zoom Technologies surely is biased toward profit-making. I mean Zoom the interface. Or Skype. Or Google Hangouts. Or Facebook. Any synchronous multi-party video communication tool: what does it really want to do?

First and most importantly, Zoom is visual. It is not biased toward audio the way that a conference call is. It is biased in favor of sight. When participants disable their video, the Zoom session loses some of what it’s really good for.

Specifically, Zoom is biased toward sight of other people. It’s not a webinar platform, at least not the way most of us are using it. A webinar has a visual bias, too, but not necessarily a personal one; you’re meant to see the content on the screen, which can be slides or videos or a person. Zoom is for people.

Finally, on Zoom people talk to one another. They don’t simply listen to one presenter. So in addition to a personal, visual bias, Zoom is also biased for interaction. You can lecture with it, but that’s not what it’s really good for.

This clicked for me during a recent youth group session. I gave a really simple check-in prompt: tell us about a time when you weren’t ready. And then people told stories. It was fun and easy, and the vibe was authentically human and personal. It felt like the exact thing Zoom was invented to do, help people tell stories to each other.

Zoom has a range of capabilities that include screen and audio sharing, a whiteboard, and text chatting. As we design activities with it, however, it will help to be guided by an awareness of where the needs of our activity and the bias of Zoom overlap.

There’s an argument being advanced in open letters and Op Eds about “cancel culture” and the threat to free speech posed by an illiberal and intolerant woke orthodoxy. One piece of evidence proponents of this argument have produced is data on the levels of self-censoring people are practicing, that is, the amount to which people who previously would have felt free to express their opinions have stopped, for fear of reprisal. This, the Op Eds warn, has a chilling effect on free speech.

Maybe some people have stopped airing their views out of fear of social or professional consequences. That’s certainly not healthy for a democracy that prides itself on protecting a multiplicity of speech. We should resist such fear.

But maybe other people, maybe more people, are choosing to listen before they speak, if they choose to speak at all. Maybe self-censorship is not oppression but self-control, a choice one makes for themselves about how to value their voice relative to everyone else’s, particularly, in this moment, relative to voices that have been ignored or silenced for centuries.

Self-censorship might not necessarily point to curbed liberties. It might point to maturity.

I spent last evening in the kitchen with Daughter as she played for me her playlist of songs from musicals and tried to improv caramel on the stove. I heard some profanity (thank you, “Be More Chill”), and the caramel got burnt and thrown out, but it was as pleasant a time as I could have hoped for.

Some of the best moments as a parent are the ones where you make yourself as invisible as possible. Just be in the space with them, don’t intrude, and you will be admitted to things you did not know were there.

Email newsletters were the worst, but now they’re my main news medium. Every day I get filtered into its own Gmail label a newsletter from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Insider, Reuters, the AP, Heather Cox Richardson, and WBEZ. Those are all free. In addition, I pay for a couple, like The Dispatch and Persuasion.

That latter newsletter tier is really interesting, because those outfits are new. Using the Substack platform, writers with backgrounds in legacy media have launched their own publications, and they are newsletter-first operations. They’re backed up by websites, and most are accompanied by podcasts, but the main product is the email newsletter–which you pay for.

I’m finding the arrangement well worth the nominal subscription fee.