Cogs of Joy

Upsplash

This season I have a spacious schedule and so I am watching that space to see what it might need to hold. This week that space held cooking. Our church is hosting a men’s shelter for the month, and people sign up to cook the evening meal for the 25 guys who will bunk in our downstairs for the night. Wednesday was my turn.

The day was wide open.  I’d prepped a few things over the weekend. And there was even space for the inevitable run back to the grocery store for the obligatory forgotten items. I could both take the Advil for the complaining back or take a small nap with a couple down dogs to let my bones know I heard their needs and made space for them. By the end of the day, I had enchiladas, cornbread, salad, cake, graded assignments, and a body that grumbled, but wasn’t in revolt. I headed into church with my goods.

I arrived to a bustling parking lot.  Our church also cooks a once-a-week meal where “nobody leaves hungry.”  I think the current numbers are 200 meals a week.  As I parked the car the meal was wrapping up.  I was carrying a 3-layer cake and a Trader Joe’s bag with all the dinner’s accoutrements down the ramp towards our galley hall as people were coming up the narrow ramp with brown paper bags holding their takeout dinner.   Upon entering the basement room,  I saw the kitchen staff hand washing the last of the pots, people selecting leftover veggies to take home, the bleach towels out wiping down the tables, wheeled carts collecting leftovers. I maneuvered the tight turns, holding the cake out of the way of the hive of activity, making my way to the long set of tables waiting for round two of food for the night.

I deposited the goods and bartered for a cart, smiling at strangers, smiling at friends, and smiling so I didn’t run into anyone with the less than responsive conveyance on wheels, doing the stop and start dance of a crowded room that didn’t have established traffic patterns.  I made it back up the ramp, passing the last of the people headed in for their dinner, and the people clad in Open Kitchen t-shirts who were clearly at the end of a long day.  I filled the cart, crossing my fingers that nothing would hit a passerby, or bump into a wall, or clip a corner and dump on the ground, and I took note of all the other humans doing the same thing.  Finding food for their families, moving piles of stuff from here to there, covering the leftovers, taking out the trash, making way for what was next. 

I’d been in my kitchen most of the day, they’d been in the church kitchen most of the day, and others had been making their own worlds go round outside any kitchen. I felt like a cog in a machine. A big, beautiful machine that was a part of a community that cared. I got to do my little cog part, they were doing their cog part, and together the world was a better place because humans were being humans together.

That is resistance to the narrative that the world is broken. That is joy.  Little cogs of joy.