I turned my Birthday Zoom meetings into an experiment that helped me see how church works.
A last minute bout of laryngitis/bronchitis has encouraged me to be a fly on the wall of my birthday conversation. I hadn't planned for it to go this way, but I decided to mute myself and blacken out my video and invited people into the Zoom room.
The morning meeting started at 10:00 am. I activated the Zoom room at 10:00 am sharp and let people dwindle in for five minutes. I did a screen share and played my welcome video with the instructions. I didn't mute anyone, so as the video was playing, people were talking... and missing some of the instruction. I figured that out because it took a while for the conversation to move forward, and then one friend had a poem for me, but suggested we wait until I showed up before she shared her poem. My mother reminded her that I wasn't going to show up. (I had mentioned something like that in the introductory video.)
It wasn't long before the conversation started rolling without me. One attendant had technical issues and that kept others from continuing the conversation. Her screen would keep freezing. That halted the conversation for a few minutes.
Eventually, the conversation started rolling again, and during the next half hour, I noticed a few funny things.
The attendees spoke about me in third person even through I was in the room. (I never hid that fact)
They told me that they can't wait until they can see my face and hear my voice.
And eventually they just did their own thing and had their own conversation.
And at the end they remembered me again and sang me Happy Birthday.
This reminded me of the average church service. People gather around the celebration of someone who they don't see and can't hear. That person is in attendance... at least that is what they have been told. But there is no real evidence of that. There maybe moments when they think that someone is communicating to them, but then others are clueless.
I had the chat window open and my Mom messaged with me. She knew how to use chat. But I messaged my other friends, and they weren't getting my messages. Mom later figured because they didn't know how to operate chat. She figured that was my job to enlighten everyone on all the nuances of Zoom. I told Mom as I explained my experiment to her, that it gave her something more to share. She could pass the messages along.
The second meeting went well, but also had a glitch of the electronic variety. One of the attendants didn't have audio, but soon figured a way to compensate and she hand wrote messages. Something different... she had access to chat, but went old school. More for the story.
I did reveal myself with ten minutes left on the clock. We had a nice visit and I enjoyed the discovery of what it was like to be invisible, yet present.
My take away from both meetings... It is an exercise in humility for someone who is used to being the centre of attention.
