I Do The Dishes After Everything

There is a particular sound a church hall makes at the end, when the tables are down and the chairs are stacked and the last four people are having the conversation in the doorway that is going to take another twenty minutes.

He hears it from the kitchen with his hands in the water.

Twenty-four years.

Every shared meal. Every funeral reception, which is a different job entirely because of the pace and because of who comes into the kitchen to be somewhere else for a minute. Every Christmas. The wedding of the daughter of a man he has known forty years, which was the best day that hall ever had and which produced, by his count, four hundred and eleven items.

He has a system. Glasses first while the water is cleanest, then cutlery, then plates, then the serving dishes, then the pans, then the sink itself, then the floor, then the mats out and the door propped for twenty minutes so the room dries.

He is usually the last car in the parking lot by about fifty minutes.

And here is the plain fact about it that he arrived at years ago and has never bothered anybody with.

At the end of every one of those days, the entire result of four hours of work is that nothing is there. No plates. No pans. Nothing to look at. The hall is exactly as it was before anybody came, which is the point, and which means the whole of the work goes down a drain and out of the building.

He does not mind that. But he thinks about it. He is sixty-one and he has spent a lot of hours alone with that thought and running water.

What this page will not do

Let me say it straight, out of respect.

Nothing here is going to promise you that anybody will notice. I do not know that and I am not going to pretend to. You may do this for another twenty-four years and nobody may ever say a proper word.

And nothing here is going to hold you up as an example to anybody. There is no paragraph coming where the man in the kitchen is set in front of the people in the hall.

And nothing here is going to tell you that hidden work outranks visible work. It does not, and you would not thank me for saying it.

You are not being consoled here, and nothing on this page asks you to be pleased about it disappearing. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one sentence Paul puts at the end of his longest argument, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man reconciled to being filler before He would speak to him.

Where Paul puts the sentence

Here is the verse, and where it sits is as important as what it says.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

That is the last verse of 1 Corinthians 15.

Which is the resurrection chapter. Fifty-seven verses of the hardest and highest argument Paul ever made: that Christ is risen, that death is swallowed up, that this mortal shall put on immortality, that the last enemy is destroyed.

And then, immediately, with no transition at all, he says: therefore, get on with the work, and know that your labor is not in vain.

He has just spent a chapter proving that things are not lost. And the very first thing he applies it to is ordinary labor.

You are doing work that Paul explicitly attaches to the resurrection argument, and the not in vain is the conclusion of fifty-seven verses about things not being lost. I am not stretching that. 1 Corinthians 15:58 is the final verse of that chapter and it begins with therefore, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man with his hands in a sink at half past three.

Not in vain is a claim about disappearance

Now look at the phrase itself, because it is oddly specific.

Not in vain. Which means: not empty, not for nothing, not evaporated.

That is a claim about disappearance, and it is the exact claim a man needs when the entire visible result of four hours is an empty room.

Paul does not say your labor will be recognized. He does not say it will be remembered. He says it is not in vain, which is a statement about whether the thing still exists somewhere, and the whole preceding chapter is his argument for why he is entitled to say it.

You have been doing work that does not evaporate, and the word makes that specific claim rather than a general encouragement. That is 1 Corinthians 15:58 in its own words, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that kitchen for twenty-four years and has watched every item of the four hundred and eleven.

And the ones who come into the kitchen at a funeral

Now the specific thing, because you know exactly what I mean.

At a funeral reception, people come into that kitchen. Not to help, particularly. They come in because a hall full of people being kind is a very hard room to stand in for two hours, and a kitchen with somebody quietly working in it is the only place in that building where nothing is required of you.

You have never once made anybody feel they should not be in there. You do not stop what you are doing and you do not ask questions and you hand them a towel if they want one and about half of them take it.

You have been running a room where the bereaved can stand for twenty-four years, and it is not on any schedule, and it is not what anybody thinks you are doing.

You have been holding a place open for people at the worst hour of their lives and no one has ever called it that. The word says God sees in secret, and Matthew 6:4 says it without any hint that a witness would improve it, and the Spirit who bears witness has been standing in that kitchen at every one of those funerals.