Doing & Doughnuts

Don’t know what gave me the idea, but amid grad school and piano students and my own elementary classroom, a couple of years ago I decided to add “doughnut chef” to my list of weekly duties.

No interview. No questions. No meeting the manager. No “do you know how to cook anything besides eggs?” I was hired to work on the Doughnut Shift, coming in on Saturdays at 2 am or 4 am.

We were a motley crew, the Doughnut Shift. There was me, who had only figured out in my recent cooking ventures that not packing the flour was an Unspoken Rule of the kitchen. Then there was Pastor Jeff who tried to teach me how to run the 30-40 pounds of dough through the cutting machine*. He also offered for me to visit his church for the series he was about to give on the End Times (an offer I did not take him up on). From my inexpert position, he seemed to know a lot about making doughnuts in mass, but his system for arriving at ratios never did make sense to me. There was Danielle, a teacher’s assistant in my classroom, who knew Much More about doughnut making and apple fritter weighing than I did (which isn’t a difficult level of cookery to achieve). We reversed roles at the butcher block as we used the leftover doughnut dough to weigh out apple fritters to a fraction of an ounce: her the teacher, and me the student. Then there was Callie, the 15-year-old homeschool student who joined us around 4 am. She really was the one who taught me how to decorate the 2,000 doughnuts we moved on a Saturday, and also how to fill the doughnuts, two at a time, with the Bavarian cream and jelly and lemon and I can’t even remember all the other fillings.

A few of the thousands of doughnuts I decorated.

But mostly, there were the Dishes. Which, if you think about 2,000 sweet treats being purchased on a single day in a town with a population of 1,497, there would be a lot of Dishes to be done. (And truly, the population of the town has absolutely nothing to do with the volume of dishes I needed to wash, but I thought it was an interesting fact to help understand what a small town this doughnut shop was located in). Sometimes, the line would stretch out into the parking lot as people awaited us to serve them. It wasn’t uncommon to see whole families, straight out of bed, hair in disarray, pajamas their style of choice — up at this hour on a Saturday, solely, for the doughnuts. Clearly, they were planning to hop back in bed after they took their dozen home. The faster I washed the dishes, the faster they could go back to sleep.

First day on the job with my cooking teacher Danielle and my sister Mercy.

And I think of another woman bustling about in a kitchen. Perhaps not doing the dishes dirtied from 2,000 doughnuts, but maybe making just as big of a clamor as I might make trying to put a bowl of chips and salsa out for a dozen young people crowded in my kitchen. Or, more realistically, the clamor I make in working in the office at my church, teaching in my elementary classroom, planning special services, teaching Sunday school, driving to worship services, or making beds for guests in my home.

Maybe you’re not like me. Maybe you do this all with perfect peace and tranquility. But Christ’s words have this consoling familiarity, “Merilee, Merilee, you are troubled and anxious about many things: but one thing is needful…”

And there’s this standing invitation to drop all the doing. While Martha makes the doughnuts in the kitchen, Jesus kneels in front of his closest friends and serves them. Somehow his serving isn’t so much product-centered as it is people-centered — not the meal they would be consuming, but the people with whom he’d be consuming the meal. Not so much the beautiful table, but the beautiful people who’d be seated around that table.

Perhaps that’s the heart of what he was after when he reprimanded the woman fixing him his dinner. “I’m not here for the food. I'm here to spend time with you.”

“One thing… One thing is necessary.”