Thanking God for the dishwasher

As I stood washing the sinkfull of dishes by hand while Asherel dried, I realized I had forgotten to thank God....ever.... for the dishwasher. But now it was too late. The dishwasher was dead.

As we washed the dishes, and the first real cold snap was settling its icy fingers around our city, I told Asherel how in the days before modern appliances and indoor plumbing, imagine what a typical evening was like.
"There was no time for Beatles Rock Band, I assure you...they had to carry a yoke of icy water either from a cold stream a mile away or a well if they were lucky, haul it home, heat it over the fire, wash the dishes...."
"What if the rags they had to dry them with were dirty?"
"Well of course they had to wash those first by hand also. And all their clothes, though of course they didn't have many clothes because they had to spin the wool to make the thread to make the cloth all by hand."

We went on in that vein, while washing the dishes, enumerating the harshness of life before Nintendo one thought after another. Strangely, I felt a camaraderie, and a peaceful joy standing in the kitchen with my daughter washing the dishes and recounting a time much more difficult than we had ever had to live.  We argued good naturedly about the most efficient way to dry the silverware, Asherel insisting it was better that she dry and I put away, and I insisting each person should dry and put away their own utensils.

"But they knew about the assembly line in the old days," she insisted, "And that each person does only one part and wastes less time."
"First of all, the assembly line came much later, and second of all, while what you say is true, with assembly line work, they also lost a great deal of satisfaction in their labor. I mean who can be proud of poking a hole in a widget a million times a day?"

Thus in one dishwashing session, we waltzed through a few centuries, from the frontier days, to the industrial revolution, and even onto musing about leisure time and its pitfalls and the value of pride in one's work. She probably learned more in that half hour than we had learned all day in "school".

When we put away the last dish, and she scurried off to her modern conveniences, I paused and felt something like peace in the pit of my stomach. And this morning I have remembered to thank God for the lack of a dishwasher....and for the coffee maker.

Jeremiah 6:16 (NIV)
This is what the Lord says: "Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.