A Bad Day In The Kitchen

A long time ago someone decided that churches needed to have kitchens.

At our church, we have three: in the original fellowship hall, an oddball one on the third floor of the Preschool wing, and in Trinity Hall.

And there was a mini-kitchen near the church office that we disassembled a few years ago.

I imagine those kitchens could write a book about the life of our church that took place inside those culinary walls.

Cook talk, laughter, gossip, recipes, and compliments were shared.

Back on Wednesday, August 13, my work teammate, Judy Oguich, and I met in the Trinity Hall kitchen to inventory our supplies and make plans for a church wide lunch on Sunday, August 24.

We found adequate supplies of plates, cups, napkins, and utensils.

Since the menu called for grilling hotdogs, we believed we had lots of hotdogs leftover from a community event last fall. Unfortunately, these frozen dogs had long gone past their expiration date. We had to chuck them.

Checking on the condiments that we needed to enhance the hotdogs, we again found that mustard, catsup, relish had an expired.

No matter where we looked, we found food items that were no longer safe to serve.

In truth, I’m not surprised. A few years ago, our church closed out our Wednesday night dinners. No longer could we justify the expense based upon fewer and fewer families attending.

Now, the Trinity Hall Kitchen is used sporadically. The people who use the kitchen leave extra food in the refrigerators. These kindhearted people believe that someone will eventually consume those leftovers.

This wasn’t my first experience in the Trinity Hall Kitchen throwing away outdated or spoiled food.

I had to do this when Hurricane Isabell walloped the neighborhood as electrical service was absent for over a week.

There were other times too.

Leftover food from Sunday night youth dinners were not consumed in a timely manner, and they too had to be tossed.

Perhaps the only good thing that came from disposing of this food was recycling the containers where the food had been stored.

I despise days like Wednesday, and the ones I’ve encountered in the past.

My disgust comes from revisiting Deuteronomy Chapter 15 verse 11: “There will always be poor people in the land.”

And from Matthew 26 and Mark 14: “The poor you will always have with you.”

Look, I’m no Biblical scholar, but those three verses cast an embarrassing guilt over me. In these situations, I could have done better than tossing out all this food.

If I had only been more attune to those refrigerators, we could have fed more people in our community.

I wonder why those three verses are in the Bible?

Were they written as a challenge?

Did the scripture writers think, “Hey, let’s tell the knuckleheads on earth that the poor will always be with them.”

If we tell them this, maybe, they will look at those statements and ask: “Why should we always have the poor with us?”

Why don’t we work together to wipe out poverty in our world so that we will have no poor people.

Seems like a noble idea, but unfortunately, we have been failing for centuries at eliminating poverty.

So why is it that we can explore the vastness of space, perform heart transplants, dam mighty rivers, build skyscrapers that touch the blue yonder, and yet we can’t figure out how to solve the challenges faced by the poor.

Williamsburg, Virginia native, Bruce Hornsby, has built himself quite a career as an extraordinary piano player, songwriter, and singer. His first hit single with his band The Range was a song titled “The Way It Is.”

From my first listening of the song, I was hooked.

The lyrics caught my attention too. The words are a snapshot of ongoing social challenges in America.

But it is the chorus that stuck to me:
“That’s just the way it is.
Some things’ll never change.
That’s just the way it is.
Ah, but don’t you believe them.”

Having the poor with us, “That’s just the way it is. Some things’ll never change.”

For me, the bleak affirmation of those two lines is countered with the last line: “Ah, but don’t you believe them.”

We are long overdue to believe that we can solve the vicious generational cycles of our poor.

When are you, me, we, us going to start our work?