The Keeping of Living Things
And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
– Genesis 2:15
Because you have… eaten of the tree… cursed is the ground because of you… thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you… by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.
– Genesis 3:17-19
I remember the specific moment when I realized what I had gotten into having four kids: I’m standing in the bathroom, holding a flosser in my hand, straining to see between one of the kids’ back molars, when it hits me that I have committed to the care of 20 baby teeth and what will be 32 adult teeth per child. I have committed to the daily brushing and flossing, the sealing and dental cleaning and cavity-filling and orthodontic alignment (in all its phases), of 208 individual teeth. Which amounts to thousands of dollars, dozens of trips to offices, and untold hours of time.
If you had asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I would not have said, raise 208 teeth! Yet that is what I am doing. Every day, I am about the keeping of living things. I water plants, change out the fish’s tank, brush the cat, exercise the dog, teach and feed and wash and play and listen to the kids, much of it at the same time, all of it non-stop. I run everyone’s care like simultaneous strands through my mind all day long: doing a math lesson with one child while keeping an ear out for how two others are playing and when the fourth needs her butt wiped while cognizant of how long treat will last the puppy and when the oven will be done preheating.
Many are the things that must be daily done. And much of it, repetitive. To keep living things is to labor in a world of Sisyphean tasks, cleaning things that will only get dirty again, like teeth and tables, clothes and counters. Feeding creatures who only get hungry again. Teaching concepts that proceed two steps forward, one step back. Navigating the same emotional behaviors. All of these things have been amplified by the pandemic, which has only magnified the amount of dirty dishes, emotions, lessons, snacks and meals.
But in all this, two truths are emerging. The first is that all this is not outside of God’s design. The first vocation man was ever given was to work and keep a garden. He was ordained a keeper of living things, his days marked, I imagine, more by just such repetitive labors than by any glamor or accolade. Our world says that the more you are worth, the less you should labor in these things, yet even before sin entered the world, such work was precisely what God created us to do.
The second is that it all did become cursed, and that is why, while I know my days are spent right where I am supposed to be, they sometimes feel so hard, full of sweat and thorns. I fight my own fragility and fatigue. I grapple with decay and dirt, with evil without and within. There is always the temptation just to see all the tasks of keeping as something to be gotten over with, to be gotten through until the next nap, until a regular school year starts, until the kids leave or the dog mellows.
“Many are the tasks that must be daily done. Meet me, therefore, O Lord, in the doing of the small, repetitive tasks... for you make no distinction between those acts that bring a person the wide praise of their peers and those unmarked acts that are accomplished in a quiet obedience without accolade.”
But the intersection of these two truths is where the gospel dwells. Yes, the tendency towards decay is all around me, but it is in these labors that I am living out a restoration towards the world that God intended. I am creating order out of chaos, so that there can be a better space for learning and laughter, companionship and health. I am taking something dirty and making it clean again so it can better serve its purpose (even if that purpose involves getting it dirty again).
And that changes how I do these things: the labor is hard, but not as purposeless as its Sisyphean nature indicates. As Douglas McKelvey puts it so beautifully in his “Liturgy For Domestic Days,” it is precisely through these labors that we discover “the promise of the eternal hopes that underlie them,” that we remember these good ends, that we embody them for others to see and experience. So we can labor with hope as we keep the living things entrusted to our care. We can trust each small task is not without eternal meaning, offered as they are to a God who makes “no distinction between those acts that bring a person the wide praise of their peers and those unmarked acts that are accomplished in a quiet obedience without accolade.”
