Doing dishes and rolling along

"Wow, we're being fancy today!"

That's what a small kid at my church said during fellowship hour this past weekend. He said that because we switched away from using paper plates and Styrofoam cups to melamine plates and melamine cups. His mom explained this mean he shouldn't throw the plate in the trash when he was done.

I'd bought these plates and cups for my church a few years back, but we don't have a dishwasher (yet) so it's not entirely surprised that we have been using the paper plates instead. Through one of these lovely circuitous path of causes and causation, the reason that we were switching back to reusable plates is because of my running group. A handful of us run together every Saturday morning, and it's one of the things that we all look forward to every week. It's running, yes, but it's also companionship and therapy and so many things social.  

The dishes coming home for washing, in buckets,
in a shopping card I'd trash-picked a few years ago.

The week after the smoke from the Canadian wildfires blew in and then back out again, it's not surprising that the topic of conversation turned to  environmental issues.  My friend Becca was explaining to a newcomer, Jenny, that my wedding gift to her had been to do dishes for her reception, and that we'd used the church plates for this.  (I hadn't remembered that at all, even though I totally believe this because it sounds so much like me.  I love that I did this!  Yay, past me!)  At any rate, we all agreed that doing dishes for the right environmental cause is an easy lift, so we contacted the person in charge of the fellowship hour and offered to set up a dishwashing rotation among ourselves.  The organizer was entirely agreeable, so we got to be fancy in the eyes of six-year-olds.

It's a rickety cart, but it does what it needs to.

Part of what I loved about this is that it's a small nudge in a direction that making so many people so happy.  I try very hard to be Eco without driving other people crazy. When the melamine plates came out, people who knew me well came up to me to thank me. One guy said, "I saw the plates, and I knew my sister had been here!" (And by "sister", he meant "sister in faith": me).  How sweet!  Another person who didn't know me before, but who found that I was the one organizing the dishwashing rotation, begged me to let her know if there is anyway that she could help: she wanted to do more, and didn't know how to be involved.

I think sometimes it's hard to suggest change because we think there will be so much resistance to it but the effort will be futile, or at the very least uncomfortable. But sometimes suggesting a change is like nudging a boulder that's at the top of the hill, and the gravity of our shared will to do what is right ends up meaning that the boulder just keeps going of its own accord.

Next challenge: 

Figure out a way to wash communion cups.  I've seen dishwasher racks for these that hold small numbers of cups and are very expensive.  So, that's a "no" unless I run out of other options.  I want to figure out how to build racks that can easily transport the used cups between sanctuary and someone's dishwasher.