Sitting in an online classroom or a Zoom room behind a black box or a completely blackened screen is not conducting a blind observation. It's ghoulish to pop in all of a sudden to make sure that the person knows that you are there just to make sure the person knows that you can show up at any point in time. To prove that the professor or speaker has absolutely no control over another's presence is not a blind observation. It's arrogance.
Power games are important to a lot of people. Surprising presenters or showing up to be confrontational is one way that people like to play with power. Unfortunately, this kind of power play has become the norm for online teaching and learning in a way that people are not able to effectively succeed at either. The game online is that the class sessions are recorded. Often, the recording wins -- not the people.
Human beings are not meant to play power games. People are meant to work with one another in community instead of working with power beyond our control. We are asked to live in grace and not in human power gains. While there isn't anything wrong with success, how we get there needs to be within two realms: sanity and humanity.
Sanity requests that we not bludgeon one another with rules. Most people are trained to think in "wrongs." We've been taught that two wrongs don't make a right when we weren't taught to look for what is already correct. We're conditioned to understand what is wrong. Sanity beckons us to learn to recognize and see what is right. What is correct? That depends.
Humanity requests that we use our sanity and not give in to the powers and principalities beyond ourselves such that we think we can have magical carpet rides instead of giving freedom to our souls to experience humanness. Humanity wants sanity. Christians have the great inherent excuse of the Fall in the Garden of Eden. "The Woman!" we can cry out to say that humanity has fallen from grace. Why are we still falling?
Between sanity and humanity, we have grace. Mercy! We have grace. We have the choice not to sit behind our technological screens blasting at those on the other side. We have the choice not to surprise and hide behind power that really isn't our own.
We will have days online when people won't speak, use their cameras, or even use a name other than iPhone. They don't know, so you won't know. But some days, none of us will fight with power that we don't have and can't control.
Some days are wonderful. People remain in community with one another online. Success can be had, and people are able to move on with their lives knowing that they have done the very best that they could have done. We will be able to see the power in the darkness before it is even there. We will know that it isn't the worst day or experience that it could be. Those days will let us see our human-ness. We won't need to find fault to see what is meet and right so to do.
