Keep Doing the Dishes

I just finished washing a mountain of dishes in the sink after a long day of planning, pastoral care calls and work on seasonal projects. There is no dishwasher here, just my own hands in the warm suds.

As I washed, placing and balancing everything precariously but successfully, I was very aware that it’s my own fault that there were so many. I had allowed more ‘shiny’ and interesting things or just flopping on the couch to take precedence over doing this earlier in the week. It took a while to clear the backlog. But in that time I was also aware of it slowing down my mind that has been flitting from one thing to another all day and that kept me awake at 5 this morning thinking, planning, worrying, wondering.

Washing the dishes isn’t glamorous or exciting. Many would consider it drudgery. But when I do it, there is a rhythm and ritual to the order and placing of things, of taking the dirty items and making them clean and ready for use again. Washing the dishes is a lot like Advent for me.

I’ve had many years of Advent, of walking through the weeks of Hope, Peace, Joy and Love because that’s what you do in the lead-up to the big event of Christmas. But too often I haven’t made myself slow down and do the work of Advent. This year it isn’t hard in the midst of this pandemic to recognize how much we need Jesus, God with us, to come and save us from ourselves. Perhaps the work of waiting expectantly, of preparing our hearts carefully, of making room intentionally for Jesus to fully invade our lives will be easier because we’ve lived and are living a health crisis that has impacted the whole globe.

There is work involved with Advent which I often slide by because I’m ‘busy’ with shinier things - things that on the surface seem very important and worthy. Things like baking and shopping, worship planning and decorating, finding perfect gifts and arranging meet-ups with friends and family. We’re supposed to be busy and go to all those concerts and activities and encourage others aren’t we? Because those things are supposed to give us that Christmas spirit.

But so many of those shinier things are being stripped away this year - get-togethers and parties, family gatherings and concerts, gifts for people we probably can’t or shouldn’t see. We can bemoan these losses, or we can embrace the room they create for doing the dishes, the work of this season that molds and heals us, confronts and challenges us. We can see the space that is cleared in our calendars as an opportunity to have coffee dates with God, to remember the need for that time and to pray and bask in the promises and story we find in scripture.

There is comfort and meaning in the rituals of the season as we wait - of putting up our Christmas trees and making gingerbread cookies, but perhaps we should also be thinking of how we can use them to make more room for God to show up in this time. We are waiting for so many things right now - a vaccine, an end to uncertainty, a return to feeling secure. We are waiting for miracles, for reassurance, for messengers who will tell us to not be afraid.

If we really engage with God’s Word all those assurances are there waiting for us to find them again and to realize that they are as true for us as they were for the people of the time. And as we wait, we need to just do the dishes, whatever those are in our ministry and our lives. We need to keep going, doing the things that need doing and that communicate preparation and making things ready for the One who is coming to save us.