Doing dishes is a waste of time. They just grow back!

CleanI’ve decided that doing dishes is a waste of time. They just grow back! Especially in my house with teenagers and their smaller siblings running rampant. They hide in dark corners and conspire about how to get yet ANOTHER cup when my back is turned. And it doesn’t help that the older ones have learned to cook. I come home from work to find that they’ve become creative gourmets without the aid of a full-time dishwasher. Granted, they are old enough that I can pull the “I’m the mom and YOU can do the dishes” card. But still, the reality exists that there are always dirty dishes around no matter how many times we wash them.



Life is like that. We do the same things over and over. We sleep, we wake, we eat, we read our Bibles, say our prayers, work, talk to friends, drive the same roads, cuddle with our kids, laugh, eat again, pay the bills, empty the pantry, go to the grocery store, come back home, lather, rinse, repeat…and it’s wonderful. Somehow, in the midst of the sameness, there’s always an adventure. There’s joy and comfort. We humans like consistency after all.

Our spiritual lives echo this pattern. We die to ourselves daily (1 Cor. 15:31). We read the same Bible over and over and never even begin to exhaust its bounty. We pray daily and it continues to refresh and revive us. We “repent and do the first works” (Rev. 2:5) um, more than once. The cool thing is that no matter how many times we blow it and dirty things up, there’s always a dishwasher. His grace is sufficient for me! (2 Cor. 12:9)



Okay, maybe doing dishes isn’t such a waste of time after all.

9 thoughts on “Doing dishes is a waste of time. They just grow back!

    • inspiredbythecomforter says:

      It’s not so much the act of doing the laundry that I mind, it’s the putting away laundry that gets me every time. I’m notorious for leaving neatly folded laundry in piles on the sofa only to have them knocked over, dug through or trampled. Sigh. 🙂

      • L. Palmer says:

        That is the fate of much of my family’s laundry too – it all gets folded, only to be moved around the frontroom until it needs to be re-folded again.

  1. abigailallen396 says:

    I like your post. It is true that dishes grow back and they can be a pain, but one of the important things about having people around you is knowing when to delegate. If you insist that when the children use something, when they finish with it it goes in the dishwasher and for smaller children have cups with their names on them. When they request something to drink give them their cup, put other cups out of reach for small children and when they return to the kitchen for another drink ask them where their cup is. If they get in the habit of using that cup there will be less of an accumulation.

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