250+ Ways to Wash Dishes
600,000 B.C. Can you even begin to wrap your head around how long ago that is and what life here on earth must have been like then? Are you thinking about dinosaurs? Maybe imagining a caveman carrying a club and dragging a woman by the hair? Are you trying to picture some sort of creature that is ape-like but strangely human? For me, the picture is one of a man and a woman doing their best to hunt and gather and cook what they need to sustain them and a child or two. Yes: cook. For according to world religion expert Mircea Eliade in his 1981 first volume of The History of Religious Ideas, the earliest evidence for the use of fire dates back to 600,000 B.C. That is a mind-bogglingly looonnnngg time ago. Given that, can you even begin to imagine how many human individuals have lived on this earth or where you would put them if they were all here in the flesh now? The number is staggering. Even in the present day, we’re talking about an estimated 8.2 billion people sharing this planet with us.
I read somewhere that a researcher observing how people around the world wash dishes found that there are at least 250 ways to accomplish this task. Whether this number is accurate is immaterial, because I have personally observed dozens of people washing dishes, including my husband and six kids, and I can tell you that each one has his or her own method of getting things clean (or, in some cases, not quite). The point? If something as basic and mundane as a household chore can be approached in any number of ways, depending upon the individual engaging in the task, isn’t it absurd to think that every person ever created and/or alive now should believe what you believe and live the way you do? Isn’t it absurd to think that God, who created all of these individuals, wants to have only one kind of relationship with them, a relationship that follows certain rules and depends upon certain books written, compiled, published, and interpreted—may I remind you—by human beings who are not God?
So to you, I say, “Happy Holidays.” May you be richly and abundantly blessed.
Speaking of long ago: this photo of our unique family in our unique house was taken (and edited) back in 2010.
