The Camera Has To Be On

Here is what actually happens in that hour.

Somebody is presenting. You are looking at a grid of faces. And in one corner of that grid, at all times, in real time, is your own face, moving when you move, reacting when you react, and available for continuous inspection.

Nobody in a room has ever had that. In an actual meeting room, in the whole history of meetings, no woman has ever sat with a live mirror on the table in front of her.

And here is the second thing, which is worse. It is not a mirror in the ordinary sense. A mirror shows you when you go to it. This one shows you while you are doing something else, which means the inspection runs in parallel with the work, and neither one gets your whole attention.

So the hour has two things happening in it, and one of them is a job nobody assigned.

What the small square takes

Let us count what it takes, because it is more than people think.

It takes attention, obviously. Some proportion of the hour has been spent on the corner and not on the person talking, and that proportion has been going up for two years.

It takes performance. Because the face is visible, it begins to get managed, and managing a face while listening is a genuine additional task and it is exhausting in a way that nothing else in that meeting is. It is the opposite of care and it runs for a whole hour.

You are doing two jobs in that hour where everybody else in the room is doing one, and no meeting anywhere has ever once asked you for the second. Hebrews 12 says let us run with patience the race that is set before us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the extra task off a woman's afternoon.

And it takes speaking. There is a version of you that has stopped putting things into meetings, and the reason is not that the ideas stopped. It is that speaking means everybody looks, and now you can watch them looking, in real time, on a screen.

You are doing two jobs in every hour and only one of them is the meeting, and no room in history has ever once required the second. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman what a small square is actually taking, and Hebrews 12 has an instruction about where to fix a gaze and what to take it off.

And here is the strange part, which is worth saying out loud.

You would never do this to another person.

Anybody chairing that meeting, seeing that one participant had a live image of herself in front of her the whole hour, would turn it off for her. Immediately. You would recognize it instantly as an unreasonable thing to ask of anybody.

Nobody has ever done that for you, because nobody knows, because everybody has one.

You are being asked to do something you would never ask of anybody else, and it has never once been part of what that meeting requires. Scripture in Hebrews 12 says looking unto Jesus, which is an instruction about a direction of gaze, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a woman's attention off a corner.

Looking off unto Jesus

There is a famous instruction in Hebrews 12, and the verb underneath it is more physical than the English suggests.

Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith. (Hebrews 12:1 and 2, King James Version)

Looking unto. The word carries the sense of looking away from something in order to look at something else. Not just fixing a gaze, but removing it from where it was.

Which means an instruction to look at one thing is always also an instruction to stop looking at another, and Hebrews assumes there is something the eye is currently on.

You are given an instruction that has never once been only about where to look, and it has always been about what the eye is coming off. It is written in Hebrews 12 that we run looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an eye off a thing it has been resting on.

And notice what comes immediately before it.

Let us lay aside every weight.

Not every sin. Weight is a different word and it comes first. A weight is a thing that is not wrong and is slowing you down, and in a race a runner puts aside things that are perfectly innocent because they are heavy.

The small square is not a sin. Nobody in this article is calling it one. It is a weight, and Hebrews has a category for exactly that, and the instruction about weights is not repent. It is lay aside.

You are carrying a weight rather than committing a fault, and no instruction about a weight has ever once been an instruction to repent of it. The Spirit of God is what gives a woman a category for a thing that is heavy without being wrong, and the written word says let us lay aside every weight.

Hide your own square

So here is the assignment, and it is a setting rather than a resolution.

In one meeting this week, hide your own square and look at the person talking.

There is a setting for this in every one of those programs. It is usually called hide self view, and it hides your image from you and from nobody else. Everybody else still sees you exactly as before. Nothing about how you appear to anybody changes at all.

You are able to take your own face off your own screen, and nobody else's view of you has ever once depended on your watching it. Hebrews 12 says looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, and the Spirit of God is what gives a woman somewhere else to look for an hour.

That is worth saying twice, because a woman will assume this means turning the camera off and it does not. The camera stays on. You stop being one of the people watching you, and that is the only change.

One meeting. One hour.

And here is what most people find. They hear more of it. Not slightly more. Substantially more, because a whole parallel job stopped running and all of that attention went back into the room.

You are able to remove one job from an hour without anybody else noticing anything, and no other person in that meeting has ever once needed you to be watching. The written word in Hebrews 12 lays aside a weight before it says anything about running, and the Holy Spirit is what makes one changed setting into care rather than into avoidance.