I Volunteer For The Dishes

The plates go down and you are up before anybody has finished chewing.

And it is genuinely helpful. Nobody in that family has ever once complained about it. Your sister says every year that she does not know what they would do without you, and she means it, and it is true.

But you and I both know what it is.

It is forty minutes with your back to the room and a job in your hands and a legitimate reason not to be sitting down. It is the only forty minutes of the day where nobody expects anything of you conversationally.

You have not sat at a family table through to the end in about eleven years.

And it is not dislike. There is one person in that room who is hard work, and one subject that comes up about twice a year, and everything else is genuinely fine and always has been.

But the sink is where you are, from the moment the plates come off the table until somebody says they should be getting off, and that is roughly the shape of every gathering since about 2014.

The best hiding place in the house

Let me say what makes this so difficult to see: it is a genuinely good hiding place, because everything about it is true.

The dishes need doing and they get done. Nobody has to ask. It is service, and service is a virtue, and you would pass any test anybody applied to your motives because your motives are not bad. There is no sulking at that sink.

You are just not in the room, and you have not been for eleven years, and nobody has noticed because the absence is the shape of a helpful man.

You have found the one absence a family never questions, and no amount of genuine service has ever once been the same as being present. Luke 10:40 has a woman cumbered about much serving in a house where the Lord was sitting, which is the written word putting the two side by side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can get a man to a chair without calling him lazy.

And there is somebody in that room who is a whole person here too. Whoever it is you are avoiding, and there usually is one, has their own reasons for being hard work, most of them older than you.

They are also right about something, possibly the thing you find hardest to hear, which is that you are never actually there.

You are able to hear that from somebody without it being an accusation, and being told you are absent has never once been the same as being told you are a bad man. The Spirit of God is what makes an honest observation survivable, and it is written in Luke 10 that Martha was busy while the sitting was happening.

Cumbered about much serving

But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. (Luke 10:40, King James Version)

There is a way of reading that story that makes Martha the villain, and it is wrong and it has done a lot of damage.

Jesus does not tell her the serving was worthless. Somebody made that meal. The word cumbered means dragged around, pulled in several directions at once, and what He says to her afterward is that she is careful and troubled about many things.

Careful and troubled. That is a diagnosis of a state, not a rebuke of a task.

You are being described rather than condemned, and being dragged around by a job in your own family has never once made a man a hypocrite. It is written in Luke 10:40 that Martha was cumbered about much serving, which is the written word naming the state with sympathy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can name a thing in a man without shaming him for it.

And notice what Martha actually asks for. She does not ask for help with the dishes. She asks Him to send her sister into the kitchen.

That is the tell. She does not want the work done. She wants company in the place she has chosen to be, because she cannot come out of it and she cannot bear being in it alone.

You have been asking for company in the kitchen rather than a way back to the table, and no help at a sink has ever once been able to fix what is actually missing. The Spirit of God is the one who sees past the request to the thing behind it, and Luke 10 has the Lord answering the state and not the complaint.

Sitting down is harder than it looks

Here is the honest part, because I am not going to pretend this is easy.

Sitting down at that table means nothing to do with your hands and nothing to hide behind, and somebody will ask you something, and the room will go where it goes. That is genuinely uncomfortable and eleven years of avoiding it means the discomfort is now large.

So do not sit down for the whole afternoon. That is not the assignment and it would fail.

You are able to sit down for one stretch of it, and twenty minutes in a chair has never once been an all or nothing commitment. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to stay in a room a while longer than usual, and it is written that Martha was cumbered about much serving while there was sitting available.

And there is a small mechanical thing that makes it possible. Bring your mug to the table and put it down in front of you.

That sounds absurd. It works, because the thing that gets you up is not really the plates, it is the absence of a reason to remain, and a mug on a table is a reason to remain that requires no explanation to anybody.

You are allowed to stay in a room without earning it, and being at a family table has never once required a man to be doing something useful. The Spirit of God is what makes an ordinary chair bearable, and Luke 10:40 puts the serving and the sitting in the same house at the same hour.