I Am Not In Control
Prepared message given as part of Three Rivers worship on Zoom, 15 July 2021.
Hi Friends. I’m so glad you’re here. I’d like to tell a story about trying to be faithful last month, doing the tech for this year’s hybrid Quaker Spring gathering, and about what it felt like to get hit over the head by God with a 2x4 in the process.
The Quaker Spring planning committee was meeting on Monday evening to review the first day of the gathering and make plans for the second day. Not only was our gathering hybrid for the first time, but our planning committee meetings were hybrid as well. We were holding our planning meeting in the living room of the Friends Center at Stillwater Meeting in Barnesville, Ohio, and there were seven of us in the room and four more coming in via Zoom. We were using a laptop and a mobile hotspot for Internet, a Meeting Owl for camera, microphone and speakers, and a projector for viewing video. It had been a long, hard day trying to figure out how to set up the Stillwater Meetinghouse for our first sessions of the week. I was exhausted, frustrated, and afraid about having to do it all again for the next three days. I was unsatisfied with the results we were getting in the meeting room: people on Zoom couldn’t hear us, I couldn’t sit close enough to the laptop to operate it, and our Internet connection was flaky because we also had to use mobile hotspots in the meeting room -- it hadn’t even occurred to me that there wouldn’t be high speed internet installed there. Everything was so imperfect!
So that evening... when the lightning storm rolled in… and the power started to flicker… I didn’t really believe it was happening. In another couple of minutes the lights flickered for the last time and the room went dark. Of course, the laptop, projector, and hotspot were battery powered and kept working, so we could continue the meeting, albeit in the dark. But it was at this moment that I realized that I was not in control. I’m grateful that God sent that lightning storm and power failure on the first night, so I could benefit from that learning for the whole rest of the week! And I’m also grateful that it didn’t end our planning meeting, but actually made it even more imperfect than it already was. It may have been a 2x4 to the head, but it was such a beautifully balanced 2x4, so perfectly aimed. I think I actually laughed with relief.
The pandemic gave me an opportunity to bring together my unique set of gifts and skills to do work at the intersection of technology and spirit, and the paradox is that I’m grateful for something so terrible. And I really like to do this work well. I like to be in control. I like being able to make a detailed cue list for the events of a gathering, and I like to run down that cue list and hit every cue. I know that when this work is done well, it completely disappears, and allows the worshipping body to experience an event with feelings of safety and trust that it is being held in capable hands. The trouble is, that’s not really where safety comes from. It’s not God who says that we have to be perfect in order to be worthy of love. We do that to ourselves, having been well trained by the world, by our parents, by our employers, by Empire. Safety isn’t in hitting all my cues, or in achieving a perfect performance. Safety comes from knowing that whatever happens, the loving embrace of the Holy Spirit is available to me even in the midst of the human chaos going down around me.
On that first evening when I was feeling afraid of having to do it all over again, I hadn’t yet realized that on the second day it was going to get easier, because once I started to let go of needing to be in control, needing for things to be a certain way, I was freed to engage with the problems creatively. Everything just sort of… loosened up. I figured out a way to be able to sit at the laptop in the meeting room so I could operate it. I solved the audio problems and made it a lot easier for people on Zoom to hear the people in the meeting room. I got help from some other folks so I didn’t have to tech host all the sessions right through the lunch break like I had on the first day.
I want to share a little about the beauty of Barnesville, and the Olney Friends School, and Stillwater Meetinghouse.
If it isn’t already coming through with these pictures, then let me add that there was also something beautiful and perfect about one of the meetings at the heart of Conservative Friends having already embraced so much technology, and flourished with its use.
One more bit: The brokenness of our tech tools is a mirror of the brokenness of our world and ourselves. I’m someone who built software tools for an entire career, so I know as well as anyone that these tools we’re using really aren’t the right ones for Quaker worship. They’re just what we have. Like Jan Hoffman says... a broken vessel can still serve.
So now I’d like to offer an invitation. In my story, I had to let go of being in control in order for God’s power to become more fully available. Here’s my invitation as we move into small groups. Sit with this question: When you think about your story, is there something about needing to let go in order for God’s power to be more fully available that speaks to you? And is there something about this letting go that you can ask others to pray for you about?
