Like many communities, my church sees the vast majority of its volunteer work done by a handful of stalwart members. I could tell you their names—most sit with me on the church board. These are the people who hop on the phone with the technician when the church’s boiler stops working on Christmas Eve. These are the people who create detailed spreadsheets of the church’s financial statements, who spend hours on Zoom in committee meetings, who set up tables, bake bread for communion, email welcome notes to visitors, and do a thousand other invisible tasks that sustain the community. The work can be tedious and thankless, but it’s essential work of community care without which the church could not continue. 

Like so many Calvin students, I started my young adult life with Frederick Buechner’s idea that vocation is “where your great gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” 

A few years in, I’d add a caveat that I read off a magnet at a friend’s house: “Everyone wants to save the world, but no one wants to do the dishes.”

This one goes out to people who wash the dishes anyway. 

You’ll find dish-washers anywhere that’s worth being. They’re in workplaces, schools, and nonprofits, social movements, meet-up groups—particularly concentrated anywhere where the need is great and money is scarce. They’re mostly (in my experience) women, often from marginalized communities, and they rarely receive the recognition they deserve. 

Not one of these people is transcribing handwritten emails into a database because it is their “great gladness.” No one sits for hours at an information booth because it is their passion. If there are people who delight in wiping down tables after a shared meal it would be news to me.

The dish-washers do this not because the tasks themselves are fulfilling or enjoyable, but because they are part of a community or movement and as such feel a responsibility to make sure the broader group’s needs are met. Just as families share chores, they work not for personal satisfaction as much as for the common good. 

There’s a way to misconstrue “vocation”—or any rule of life—as a call to pursue what makes you happy. Volunteering your time and energy certainly shouldn’t make you miserable or subject you to disrespect or abuse. But neither will every task or moment be particularly pleasant or even feel directly meaningful. 

I met do-gooders in Honduras who shrugged off financial accounting or formal registration of their charities with the claim that “they just wanted to help people!”, ignorant of harm and abuse that can occur without frameworks of accountability. 

I’m guilty myself, happy to sign up to hand out food, but less keen to get up early to make it and even less willing to write the grants that would fund it.

I want a broader understanding of vocation, one that encompasses the unglamorous, unsung labor that undergirds any community life or social change. 

Setting up the chairs before a community event: washing dishes. 

Driving across town to pick up another volunteer: washing dishes. 

Visiting the notary three different times because she keeps stamping the 501(c)3 paperwork in the wrong place: washing dishes. 

Sometimes washing dishes is literally that, nothing more and nothing less, quietly, radically submerging our arms up to the elbows in scalding hot water for the good of those around us. 

Where there are dishes, there was communion—people from different backgrounds around a table for a common purpose. At the very least, I can find deep gladness in that.

Katerina Parsons

Katerina Parsons lives in Washington, D.C. where she works on international humanitarian assistance (views not of her employer). A graduate of Calvin University (2015) and American University (2022), she lived in Honduras for four years before moving back to the U.S. to work on policy and advocacy. She enjoys reading, dancing, and experimenting in her community garden plot.