 Welcome to Longmont Voices and Vision, a project of Longmont public media. In the midst of the darkest period in our lives, when we're bombarded 24 hours a day with news of the coronavirus and the human and economic carnage it's causing in our society, we're challenged to cope with our fears and anxieties, we're remaining hopeful about what lies on the other side of this crisis. This project presents an opportunity for Longmont residents to share with others how they're adjusting to new realities of social distancing and the kind of future they hope to experience on the other side of the crisis. I'm Tim Waters, host of these conversations in a Longmont public media volunteer. In this series, I'll be asking Longmont residents, many of them your friends and neighbors, three questions. What are you doing to get through this crisis? Even though we cannot be together right now, how are we staying connected to friends and families? And what's the future you are hoping to see and experience on the other side of this crisis? I hope you'll stay with this series and enjoy listening to your friends and neighbors and learn from them how they're getting through and what they're looking forward to in a new reality on the other side. Thank you so much for your willingness to contribute to the Longmont Voices and Vision Project, lending your voice and vision both. I'm happy that you're here and I'd like to get started with this interview to give those who watched this interview a chance to know something about you. Tell us about you. Well, I am a two-time Longmont resident. My family moved here when I was three years old in 1973, lived here till I was 11 then moved to Denver and I moved back with my husband in 2000. So I've been here 20 years since the second time. So Longmont's home and has always been. I love this place. It was a little disconcerting how big it had gotten when we moved back. But once we dived in and got to know people, it's still the same small town that it was. Still love the people here. I am the executive director at Crossroads School, which is just celebrating its 10th anniversary. I'm one of the founders. It's an alternative middle and high school kids who aren't making it in traditional schools. I am also the president of the St. Brain Community Council, which is an organization of nonprofit leaders here in town. And I am the site representative for the shelter, the homeless shelter through hope that is hosted at my home church of the journey. So have my fingers in a lot of different areas in town and love what I get to do and love the people that I get. So I should have, it's an oversight to not have thanked you, not only for your contributions to this project, but for all God visions you make the Longmont. So thanks for squeezing in time this afternoon. So, you know, I'm going to ask you three questions. The first question of the three is in this time of physical separation and social isolation with all of the unknowns and the fears that go along with this experience that we're having. How are you getting yourself through this? You know, I feel really blessed to my dad brought home a computer when I was 10 years old, which isn't unusual for a lot of the younger generation. I think I'm one of the earliest digital natives. So I've been very comfortable with technology and with using it in a variety of ways. So that has made this transition easier to having to do all of my meetings like this instead of in coffee shops. You know, so that part has made it easier in terms of professionally being able to still connect with folks on, I think I'm using now six or seven different platforms that we're all having to learn how to use. And, you know, my, my job is stable. The school is very blessed to be, you know, to have good support in this community and is moving forward with meeting the kids needs online and remotely in different ways. So I don't have to worry about that piece. My husband is a plumber. So he's still going out, but his job is also pretty stable people in a pandemic still need their water heaters replaced. You know, when they break, it doesn't matter what's going on. It needs to be replaced. So, so we're very, very blessed that way. I don't have to worry about, you know, the community and all the people that I have connections with that aren't in that good of situations. So, you know, just trying to help wherever I can and reach out to folks, a little extra in this time where we're all reaching out and trying to figure out how we all get through. We're also more separated than we've ever been physically in a time when we can't be together. How are you staying connected to family and friends. One of my favorite examples is yesterday, which was my mother's 75th birthday and following the example that I had seen from another Longmont resident who had recently turned 100. I contact her friends and and everybody did a drive by birth, you know, car parade for her birthday yesterday. So that was a fun thing fun opportunity I actually sat outside six feet from her and helped her what you know and videoed while she was saying hi to everybody and got to see that connections and just what a delight it was. So that was nothing like we would have expected for her 75th but a wonderful connection with lots of folks who are very excited to have a chance to get out of their houses and go do something and so that was one example. Also, lots of lots and lots of meetings online. I have a women's breakfast group that I've met with every week for years and years and years that's now doing a zoom breakfast meeting, you know, different things like that. Well, we're all learning new meeting traditions and birthday traditions. Actually, I have another one. Yeah, we've now started meeting with our three children, two of whom don't live in Longmont. We're not every Sunday on house party and playing games together, which we could have been doing for all these years because they haven't lived here and we haven't been able to connect that way, but now we have that new tradition. Yeah, I think families across America are connecting on zoom or some platform on Sundays at some point in time in ways that we haven't in the past. I know that's true for me and my siblings. Yeah. And the last question is, based on the presumption that whatever normal was on the front side of this pandemic. It's not going to be the same life won't be the same in all ways when we come out of this. There's going to be a new normal. We just don't know what it is yet. And the question for you is what you prefer future what would you like to see and what are you willing to help create as the new normal when we can come back out of our houses. You know, I have said for years that it's all about relationships, and that what everything that gets done gets done because of relationships, whether that's between nonprofit organizations whether that's you and me connecting as a city council person and a nonprofit and being able to then connect each other to other resources that help us both. I hope that as this experience teaches us new ways to connect that it will only enhance that ability to make things happen because of relationships and to understand issues that are going on in our community because of the relationships that we have with the people engaged in those. That's that's the biggest piece for me. Of that theme in in the interviews we've been doing and let's hope that these are we're learning lessons now that we get a chance to not just a chance to but we apply with some discipline and purpose and vigor on the other side of this. Thank you so much for your contribution to the Longmont voices and vision project. Take care of yourself stay safe and healthy and take care of your family. We'll see you. We'll see we can come back out and meet in a coffee shop. Sounds great. All right, see you. Bye bye. Bye bye. Dr. David Barker. Thank you for lending your voice and your vision to this Longmont voice and voices and vision project. Each of these interviews we started by asking the interviewees to just talk a little bit about themselves. So, so that people know who they're hearing from tell us about David Barker. Well, first of all, Tim, thank you for the opportunity to be a part of this. It was an honor for me to be asked. I am pastor at Central Longmont Presbyterian Church here in Longmont. We've been here about a little over nine years. Before that, I served a church in Texas for 10 years where we are from. So we're among those bloody Texans that moved to Colorado, ruin the state for everybody else. Although now that we're here and we meet Texans who are following us, we're finding ourselves echoing the sentiments of our of our friends. You really don't need to move. Anyway, so I like a lot of mainline denomination pastors. I'm second career pastor. I was in academia as a professor of media studies for a number of years before I entered the cold ministry. But here we are and we love it. Well, we're pleased that you are in Longmont. And especially pleased with all the other contributions you make to this community that you're contributing to this project. So, you know, I'm going to ask three questions. The first of those three questions is in this in this extraordinary moment in history where that none of us have ever experienced before where we're physically separated from one another with social distancing with all of the drama and the fear that goes along with this pandemic. How are you getting yourself through this, this experience. It was in some just kind of basic logistical ways. I'm doing it the way I think most other people are and that is just embracing the realities of social distancing and wearing masks where you need to wear a mask, working from home. That's something that we've been doing. We being the church staff for about six weeks now, discovering that we actually can he's not it's not the same obviously as if we're all together. But discovering that we're able to get most of what we need to get done from home. My wife, Terry and I are spending a fair amount of time outdoors walking cycling. And in the process of going through all this, we're both discovering that we're gaining a new appreciation for what constitutes the essential things that prior to this time. Had you asked me, I would have I would have insisted were essential now discovering maybe not quite so much. And then probably some things that we took for granted that we shouldn't have the truly or more essential I think. And then the other thing that I'm that I'm doing is just really trying to stay rooted in in my faith. And in my relationship with the Lord and knowing that nothing that happens ever happens outside God's grace. And so we're not we're not doing any of this alone by any means in spite of the fact that we're spending more time alone than we typically would. Which is a nice segue to my second question. We're in a time where we can't be together physically. So given that how are you staying connected to your friends and family and it sounds like you're you're connected to more than your friends and family but how are you staying connected. Well, I have I have become conversant with with zoom meetings, which I have to admit prior to this I was I was not a huge fan of. It still would not be my preferred way of going about interacting with people, but discovered that it really works pretty well, by and large. So involved in a lot of zoom meetings, not just in terms of stuff related to the church and stuff we have to talk about, but with family and friends. And that has been nice. My, my parents live here in town. We have a retirement facility that we cannot go in and see them. So, being able to connect that way with them. A real blessing. And we've also been very intentional in our in the church about, well, early on in this process we divvied up all of the of the individuals who call central Longmont home, either people who are actually members or people who are involved in some capacity. And we divvied we divvied them all up among the leadership of the church and so every week we're calling and checking in on folks and seeing how they're doing. So just using the telephone and but that that has ended up being likewise a real blessing and I think it's meant a lot to the people in the congregation to know that every week they can count on somebody calling and checking on them and seeing how they're doing. And then we have discovered the joys of the virtual happy hour of being able to use zoom for things other than meetings and that's been kind of cool too. Well, I'll confess to being part of those happy hours with you and I know and receiving those phone calls. I'll attest to the values that the value of the technology. My last question, David, as you know is really based on the presumption that whatever was normal for us before the pandemic is likely to not be so normal after the pandemic there will be a new normal. And it's hard to know what that's going to be. But it's safe to assume I think that life will be different on the other side of this pandemic. So the question for everyone who I've had the great good fortune of interviewing is what would you like to see. And what would you like to help create on the on the other side of the crisis we're going through right now. I don't think there's any doubt that what normal is going to be when we emerge from this is what normal was before it started. And for me, that has the potential for a lot of blessings. And it is something that I can get excited about because it gives us the opportunity in some ways to kind of reset what it is that we think should constitute normal. And for me, what I would like to see this new normal involve and what I am really looking forward to having the opportunity to figure out ways to facilitate and to make happen is a new normal where people actually acknowledge and embrace the reality of interconnectedness that one of the things I'm hoping that we're going to take with us out of the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is this idea that I think we often pay lip service to that we are all interconnected with one another. And yet I think we have we have discovered seen in sort of in some pretty profound ways, the absolute truth of that that we the decisions that I make, ultimately are going to impact other people and all kinds of ways and that is something I need to be mindful of that I cannot just live for myself. And so I'm hoping that there's going to be less of that rampant individualism which is tended to define who and what we are in a move towards a greater embrace of community and truly understanding what it is that that entails and what that means. I also am hoping that this new normal is going to include policies that can I say policies I mean public policies that honor the essentialness of all people. One of the things that's been really fascinating to me in work in living through this time is looking at how we have defined what constitutes the essential job and by extension, you know the essentialness of people. I think that's changing and we're discovering that that a lot of jobs that we might not have necessarily thought of as essential in the past truly are. And I think that has led to an understanding that that perhaps those individuals that and those professions that we hold up in our society as being particularly honorable and important we really celebrate are not perhaps quite as essential as we thought they were and that there are other positions, other jobs and other people that really deserve that same degree of celebration for who and what they are and what they do. I hope that the new normal is also going to be a place at a time where we're going to get back to the reality of the truth and integrity and sacrificial love are critically important and should be the norm. I mean this the debate over and argue over over truth and the importance of integrity is something that has continued to drag on through this time. And I think that we have all seen the consequences experience the consequences of what happens when when truth can be so negotiable. And the truth that happens to be inconvenient for you. You can just ignore or dismiss is not really truth at all. So truth and integrity and sacrificial love really becoming the norm. And that goes back to the importance I think of community. And then I also would like to see a normal where we acknowledge that in many ways truth is more important than power. That old adage that that the truth is power and I think that's true. But you know we have certainly seen a lot of instances in the six weeks to this point. Of individuals using truth redefining truth in the name of power of maintaining power utilizing power sustaining power as opposed to really embracing the reality that truth exists apart from what anyone individual says that it is. And that that we all have a responsibility to embrace that. And in terms of our leaders and the people who are guiding us and making decisions that they're going to they're going to be held accountable for how they have understood truth and work and work from that truth whatever it is that is happening. Well, if if the new normal is that truth is acknowledged and valued the way you've just characterized it that I'm looking forward to the future. And the truth of this interview is that I deeply appreciate your contribution to the project. And in what you are sharing with the rest of this community. Thank you so much. Keep yourself and your beautiful wife and your family safe. I will Tim thank you very much. Take care. You too.