Professional sports re-started this past week, but the games definitely are not “normal.” All the players, coaches, officials, announcers, reporters and support staffers are quarantined in a “bubble” cut off from the rest of the world. There are no spectators in the stadium. Covid-19 made sure that “normal” doesn’t work any more.
But “normal” is not the only way to do things.
And it’s not necessarily the best way to do things.
Here’s an example from this world.
For more than 40 years my “day job” involved negotiations for education employees (yes, I was the union guy). For most of that time we used a positional or transactional strategy in which the union would make a proposal and the school board would make a counter-proposal and the parties would trade proposals until they “met” somewhere in between the two original proposals. Each party would have given up something it sought in order to get something from the other party, which means both parties ended with less than they wanted.
This was the “normal” method of negotiating employee-employer relationships.
Toward the end of the last century a new method of negotiations emerged in some areas. Instead of a series of zero-sum transactions — if one party held an item (money, time, authority, etc.) the other party could not use it or change it — both the union and employer focused on trying to meet the critical interests of all the parties. Instead of seeking a solution that benefited either the employer or the union, the negotiators looked together for solutions that met the interests of both the union and the employer.
Instead of a “normal” scarcity perspective that there is not enough and each party needs to guard and keep what they have and work to prevent the other party from diminishing any part of their supply, the parties worked with an abundance perspective that there is enough (actually there is more than enough) and they need to identify the most effective way to share and use the resources that are available.
Now, here’s an example from God’s kingdom: the Gospel reading for last Sunday from Matthew.
Jesus is preaching to a crowd outside of town as evening approaches and the disciples want to send the crowd home so they can get food. Jesus tells the disciples to give the people food. Huh? Well, they find a boy with some bread and fish. After Jesus blesses the food, the disciples are able to give everyone supper and still pick up twelve baskets of leftovers.
In Jesus’s world, it is not how much of something we have, it is how we choose to view it and use it that’s important. When we treat our stuff as if we earned it and now we own it and can determine what we do with it, then we will always be worried about whether we have “enough.” This fear (being scared of scarcity) leads to always wanting more so we can be more secure or more important.
But if we live as if God’s promises are true, then we can relax about stuff. We can be open to sharing it because God said there would be more where that came from.
Now that the Covid-19 pandemic has eliminated so many “normal” ways of doing things, this could be a great time to consider new ways of dealing with our resources — new ways of distributing our abundant stuff. (Yes, abundant: there was enough money two years ago to give people that already had more than they needed additional thousands in tax breaks!) But instead we have our government leaders haggling over whether an extra $400 causes people to not work, while the argument prevents folks from getting any desperately needed additional financial support.
Jesus told the disciples, “You give the people some food.” Maybe we should tell our government leaders, “You give the people some support.”