Riiiiiight. Yeah, I don't remember it that way either. Remember fighting with your siblings over just whose turn it was to clean up? Remember water fights and bobbing for silverware at the hands of the winner. Remember spreading foam all over your face and pretending you had rabies? Remember breaking plates, some by accident. Well if you're anxious for a chance to redeem those times, why not consider a visit to Jesus People USA (JPUSA)? I'd better warn you though. I have a family of five hundred brothers and sisters. All the men (pastors and pastored alike) take turns busting suds after dinner, and the dishes are unbreakable. We call it Night Dishes, which, when you think about it, sounds pretty ominous. Reminds me of the title of that old Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. The plot--I mean the system--is almost as melodramatic and works itself out something like this:

A wall in JPUSA's community dining room is called the Wailing Wall. Its chief resemblance to its Jewish counterpart is the sound that emanates from its proximity: wailing. Much wailing. Wailing like Captain Ahab never dreamed about, and on the wall is a list of every man in our community and the nights he's been assigned to do . . . Night Dishes (organ music here: da-da-da-duh!!). The men are divided into groups which are then assigned two nights a month; one to do dishes and one to clean up the dining room and kitchen. Why the women are not involved in this I've never been able to figure out, except that doing dishes for five hundred is a bit like storming the castle--it helps us men to have a princess to rescue. (Is this sexist or what?) To make matters worse (remember the tangled jungle of giant thorns the hero works through to get to his sleeping beauty), a certain coordinator in our house, who shall remain nameless (congratulations on the new baby, Scott!), regularly juggles the groupings and dates on the dish list, often forgetting to mention it to anyone else.

Now missionaries and their families, along with those they serve--doggone just about anybody who can sneak in the front door--must eat. To prepare these meals our ordinarily rational kitchen staff often chooses to dirty perfectly clean pots and pans--any bachelors out there will understand why I take umbrage with this. Clearly wickedness is afoot, possibly mind control, otherwise why would they do it? Having dirtied the once perfectly clean pots and pans, they stack them on a large rack where they can be ignored by the people who wash dishes during the day. (I'm kidding about the day dishwashers. They work hard to keep those racks empty and we appreciate them, but only the way Pharaoh's night shift appreciated the day shift.) Thus the male members of our community get to take turns participating in a male bonding ritual that makes Promise Keepers look like a sewing circle.

Night Dishes (da-da-da duh!!) starts at approximately 5 +p.m.+, so most of us barely have time to get home and shout, "What do you mean it's my dish night?!" before we start donning our suits of armor (sweatpants and dirty T-shirts are the chosen fashion, not much of a switch for most of us) and dashing off on the dark horse of intestinal fortitude (the flesh) to do battle (get prayer).

There are three basic mind frames with which I have seen JPUSAs approach dishes: the NACs, the GBDs, and the ESHs. At one time or another I've experienced all three. Indeed, most JPUSAs cycle through them regularly. As a friend of our ministry once said, "The only time I'm balanced is when I'm swinging between extremes." The NACs, or New and Confused, seem to have trouble grappling with the whole dishwashing construct. They use phrases like "Dishes? I came here to serve the Lord" and "Where does this go?" But slowly over time they begin to understand how theology can be practical as well as abstract. The GBDs, or Grim but Determined, are sometimes made up of NACs, but more often than not are older community members who, after a hard day's work, find that the dish list got juggled or that they just plain forgot what date it was. Either way this group is characterized by a silent glare and quick, ferocious scrubbing motions. They stare at the dirty pots and pans as if they were trying to emit laser beams from their eyes, particularly if the cooks have burned any of the food. Every head is bowed, just not in prayer. It's best to leave these people alone. I have often offered to pray with them, but you'll seldom find them willing. Their jaws set, they are wrestling in the long dark Night Dishes (da-da-da-duh) of the soul.

Lastly, and thankfully less common, are the ESHs or Endangered Slaphappy. This group specializes in evangelizing the other two. They won't rest until everyone is as silly as they are. I've never been able to figure out if their rationale is based in the "misery loves company" "or the "one true Church" heresy, but a hard-core ESH is unfortunately, as far as is known to modern science, incorrigible. The only known cure is for his fellow dishwashers to spray him down as he quotes Brother Lawrence. If they don't, they may soon find themselves involved in sponge fights and in singing along to silly songs like "Dishes today! Dishes today, What a mess we've made, what a mess we've made!!" (Sung to the tune of "This Is the Day.") ESHs dance around, make dumb jokes, and get everyone around them soaked from head to toe. Some slaphappies have even been known to lick plates clean and try to put them away. This is one endangered species no one will be raising money to save.

The dishwashing environment is dominated by the dishwasher itself. Its deceptively sleek steel exterior belies the still harder than steel truth: our dishwasher breaks down more often than an Edsel. And when it breaks down, usually in the middle of dinner, the three or four souls desperately trying to navigate through the storm that stands between them and freedom feel like they've discovered a leak in a lifeboat. At such times one cannot escape the impression that our dishwasher . . . looms. Though actually shorter than the average man, it has the loomability of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Lurch the butler from the old Addams Family TV series would walk away ashamed in the presence of our dishwasher. (Point of fact: older community members, upon reading this, have, in the true spirit of "when I was your age," reminded me that there didn't even used to be a dishwasher. At our residence in Paulina, dishes started at about 9:00 in the morning and went until 9:00 in the evening, and you washed everything by hand. Sometimes it took even longer. Writer Jon Trott remembers a tour of duty that finished up around 1:00 a.m. I'm also to understand that sometimes they washed dishes in the snow, barefoot, and by God's grace they were grateful!) Without ascribing too much personality to an inanimate object, I must bring up a feature of our dishwasher that I find difficult to explain in any other terms: the grease trap (double da-da-da-duh)!

The grease trap is a large box connected to the bottom of our dishwasher by a pipe. It's called a trap because it catches the grease before it can escape into the sewer system where it would kill the rats and alligators that live there. As a person who spends only an occasional afternoon in the Chicago sewer system, I'm not sure I understand the logic of trapping grease in my home, but I'll play along. I understand those animal rights activists can get pretty violent.

Ultimately the grease trap functions a lot like the little black box on airplanes; you aren't supposed to notice it unless something goes very wrong. The only difference between the little black box and our grease trap is that the grease trap gets full and then whoever has drawn the lard bullet in this twisted game of Russian roulette we call Night Dishes (da--oh, forget it!) has to empty it.

The mind-bogglingly, almost Lovecraftian thing about the substance in the grease trap is that it is composed only of things that were once edible. The running joke in JPUSAs dish room is "Would you eat a spoonful of that for fifty dollars? One hundred dollars?" Talk about an indecent proposal! Regarding dishes, then, there is adventure aplenty waiting for those who don't mind a little inconvenience. In fact, G. K. Chesterton once said, "An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. Not a bad philosophy for someone who probably had a maid that did his dishes for him. It is maddening though. I just can't seem to find much in my Bible about the--as Dana Carvey's Church Lady would put it--convenient Christian life. Maybe there is no such thing if we're talking about the real thing. 

First published in Cornerstone (ISSN 0275-2743), Vol. 25, Issue 110 (1997), p. 47-48
© 1997 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.
Electronic version may contain minor changes and corrections from printed version.