I spoke with someone yesterday about the November election when I knew that person and I are not going to vote for any of the same candidates for literally any office. I’m trying hard to listen and understand more than simply fulminate, and this conversation was a useful come-down after four nights of one-way DNC messaging that I found satisfactory, at times even compelling.

Speaking of the DNC, my friend quipped: “I’ve read the platform. I can’t vote for that.” Now, I’ve not read the platform. I don’t think she really has read it either. I expect she’s read missives about it on her preferred media outlets. But I checked it out, and it’s hardly notable, at least not to anyone who has a basic understanding of the broad priorities of our country’s two main political parties. And yet, it is, for my friend, this cycle’s disqualifying evidence. (I’ve since learned that the party she’s committed to support won’t be writing a platform at all at their convention. Will that cause my friend a problem?)

I’m really torn right now between my desire to listen to and understand the convictions of my ideological opponents and a gut-churning discomfort with that the fact of who they’re supporting. That is mostly because in conversations with some of these opponents in my formative years, character mattered more than anything on a ballot. That shifted four years ago–and largely hasn’t moved–to “the platform,” though hardly anything changed about the platform to make it any more loathsome to them than it would have already been, presumably.

Watching that change in them with my own eyes has filled me with anger and sadness. It also makes me a little bit afraid. Because, if their convictions about character turned out to be so thin, then how confident should I be in my own convictions–about character, but also about fairness and justice and equity and how we prioritize all that stuff?

Maybe a benefit of listening to understand is that it goads us into taking stock of what we’re telling everyone we believe and what we value. Because those things will be tested, almost certainly before we’re ready.

I woke up sneezing and sniffling this morning, took my daily allergy tablet with two cups of black coffee and read the news. Grog city. Not getting anything done. Blame the allergies and blame the news.

Then I made a few phone calls, just check-in jobs with students who graduated high school last spring and are starting their college careers. And click! Engaged, ready to get stuff done.

Don’t underestimate the power of a hopeful human voice over the phone (or, in my case, over wifi on the Google Voice extension for Chrome). This is my advice for when you’re feeling stuck and in a fog: call someone.

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.