For Wilshire Baptist Church
I don’t know if they do this at other college football stadiums, but when people are first arriving at Baylor’s McLane Stadium, a video camera down on the field is pointed at unsuspecting people and their image is thrown up on the giant video screen with the caption “Oblivious Cam.” As everyone else watches, a clock logs the amount of time it takes for the people on screen to look up and see themselves.
LeAnn and I had our moment on Saturday afternoon. We were in our seats an hour before kickoff — we like to watch the grass grow, even when it’s plastic, and check on the warm-ups because that’s what Perry Kite would do — and we noticed the Oblivious Cam was up and running. We watched a few people get nailed and then I looked away, but LeAnn said, “It’s us,” and there we were. It took us eight seconds to see ourselves, wave and send the camera off to find new victims.
It’s fun but it’s also interesting the way the Oblivious Cam highlights our distraction. Some people are talking to friends, some studying the game day program, some watching warm-ups, some eating, some apparently catching naps. And of course there is the irony of people looking at the tiny screens on their cell phones while if they just looked up they’d see themselves big as all outdoors on the 5,000-square-foot video screen.
Even when people do finally realize what is happening, they are often disoriented. It may be the sudden jolt of being nudged and seeing themselves on the screen. It may be because they feel they’ve had their privacy invaded. There can be confusion when you look up at the screen and see yourself looking somewhere else because of the location of the camera. In our case, I had the odd physical sensation of having rubber arms when I flapped them like a bird and saw the one-second delay on the screen.
The nicest moment Saturday was seeing what looked like a father and son — maybe 40 and 70 years old — just sitting having a leisurely conversation. So leisurely, in fact, that the clock ticked for two minutes and then started over. They finally looked up at about five seconds into the restart and smiled at their sudden celebrity.
You know I like metaphors and allegories, and this is the point where I usually say, “This is like . . . .” But I won’t do that today. We’ve been discussing some of Jesus’ parables on recent Wednesday evenings at Wilshire, and part of the intrigue in those stories more than 2,000 years later is finding yourself in the action.
So who are you in the weird, wired world of the Oblivious Cam? Are you the person distracted by the tiniest of things and missing the big picture? Are you sleeping while the rest of the world is watching? Are you confused and befuddled by the reality of your own existence in this time and place? Are you engrossed in something so special and meaningful that you are oblivious to everything happening around you? If you got a restart, what would you do with it?