"Some of the best disciplines for taming power are very small…
Doing the dishes serves an immediate, practical purpose. But I have come to see that it serves an even more important role in shaping my relationship to my own power. Dirty dishes remind me of my own creatureliness, my implication in and membership in the world’s glorious mess. Even the most delicious feast comes with responsibilities to patiently restore the world. The dirty dishes remind me, too, that I am embedded in relationship with other glorious and messy human beings. I don’t wash my own dishes, cleaning up after myself in a neat tit-for-tat, but my family’s and our guests’. As I lavish soap over the leavings of their nurture and refreshment, I am prompted to see how physical our love and friendship are —not just warm feelings but the tangible sharing of the very goodness of the world, always accompanied by our need for grace for all that we leave behind. Most of all, doing dishes on deadline (more than once, while the taxi waits outside our house) challenges and undermines my zero-sum calculus of opportunity. I wash plenty of dishes when I am not going anywhere, but it is the pre-travel dishwashing that is the real test of my oddly powerful life. It is only in those precious moments before I leave that it becomes clearest that serving my family feels, and is meant to feel, costly—that it limits, and is meant to limit, my own exercise of godlike freedom and significance within the bounds of a more deeply Christlike, image-bearing set of commitments and smallness. As I spend valuable time with my hands in the sink, I am challenged to trust that ‘all things are mine’ - that the God who has called me to speak to a thousand people has called me to clean this pan, and vice versa, and I have been given all the time I need, and more, both to serve my family’s mundane needs and also to use my gifts in public.” - Andy Crouch / Playing God - Redeeming the Gift of Power
May those in power, and those of us in power, be folks who are/or become very comfortable doing “dishes”. God heal our government and empower them to become servant-leaders who are mindful of their nation and fearful of You.
"Never, ‘for the sake of peace and quiet,’ deny your own experience or convictions." - Dag Hammarskjold / Markings
Have mercy on our land. I pray for wisdom and courage…
In Jesus name, amen.
{a little prayer this morning as I grieved and pondered over our government}
/ bryan