Listening In preview - Jim Denison

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Coming up next, an excerpt from tomorrow’s Listening In. This week, Warren Smith talks with Christian author Jim Denison, who offers suggestions on how to prepare for life after the pandemic.

WARREN SMITH: The new normal is not going to be like the old normal. In other words, a lot of people are saying, I can’t wait till we get back to normal and you are bringing up the likelihood that that normal is going to be real different. 

JIM DENISON: It really is going to be different. It’s on three levels. We think on one level there are things that we weren’t doing before that we’re doing now that we like and so we’ll keep doing them. 

You’re, for instance, going to see small towns have a renaissance as people are deciding that they really can work at distance and they can pay less for a house, have a smaller cost of living and be able to commute on a telecommuting kind of a platform. So we’re going to see all sorts of changes that are happening around that kind of phenomenon on kind of a permanent basis. 

On the worst side of the three kinds of ways you could look at this, we’re going to see industries changed abruptly, if not going out of business. Gold’s gym, which is one of the leading, uh, gym companies in Dallas has closed its doors with no intention to reopen. We’re hearing the tourism’s going to be 50% next year.

Then in the middle we’re going to see a new normal in the sense of things that we wish weren’t this way, but we’re adjusting as we have to. We’re discovering that we can do tele docking and telecommuting with our doctor, even though we’d rather see them in person. We can do this as a second best kind of an option. 

Within healthcare, we’re having to make some changes that may be permanent in terms of the degree to which we test people before we see them. The degree to which we have personal protective equipment more available to us, even though it’s burdensome and not very cost effective because we don’t know if this virus is going to mutate in ways that will be beyond the vaccines that’ll eventually come, so, there are going to be some really difficult new normals. They’re going to be some really positive new normals and they’re going to be some new normals in the sense of things we’re aware of now that just don’t exist on the other side of all of this.

EICHER: That’s Jim Denison talking to Warren Smith. To hear the complete conversation, look for Listening In tomorrow wherever you get your podcasts.

(Photo/Jim Denison)

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