Tending Is Not The Same As Fixing

A woman said to me once that she did not have a word for it.

She said she knew what she did every night, and she knew what she wanted it to be, and she knew those two were not the same thing. What she did not have was a word that named the difference, and without the word she kept sliding back into the only one she had.

The only one she had was fixing.

That is a real problem and it is not a small one. When a language gives you one word for an activity, that word carries the whole activity, including everything the word implies. And fixing implies a fault. It cannot not imply one. There is no such thing as fixing something that is fine.

So a woman with only that word available is, every single evening, in her own bathroom, doing an act whose only available name presupposes that something is wrong with her.

I want to spend this piece giving you two better words, and they are not mine. They are the two verbs that were used the first time anybody in the Bible was given something to look after.

What fixing carries with it

Take fixing apart for a moment, because everything follows from what is inside it.

Fixing has a fault at the start of it. Something is broken, or wrong, or below where it ought to be. That is the premise and it comes free with the word.

Fixing has an end state. There is a way the thing is supposed to be, and the work is over when it gets there.

You are inside work that was never meant to finish, and keeping a garden has never once had a completion date attached to it. Scripture in Genesis 2 records a man set there to dress it and to keep it, and the Spirit of God is what makes ongoing work feel like care rather than like failure.

Fixing has a judgment built in at the finish. When you fix something you check it, and the check tells you whether the job succeeded, and the check is not optional because otherwise you would not know.

Now hold that whole package up against what actually happens at your sink at eleven at night, and notice that every part of it is present. The premise, the end state, and the check.

You are running a word rather than an activity, and the fault has never once been observed by anybody, it came free with the vocabulary. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman the assumptions inside a word she has used for thirty years, and Genesis 2 hands over two entirely different verbs for the same kind of work.

And here is why this matters so much on this particular subject.

You would never use the word fixing about a garden. Nobody fixes a garden. A garden that is being looked after is not a garden with a fault in it, and everybody knows that instinctively, which is why the word feels wrong the moment it is applied there.

But a garden needs constant attention, and gets it, and nobody thinks that attention implies a defect.

You are able to attend to something continuously without any of it meaning something is wrong, and a garden has never once been an accusation. Scripture in Genesis 2 gives two verbs for the care of a garden and neither of them is repair, and the Spirit of God is the one who lends a woman a better word.

To dress it and to keep it

The very first job description given to a human being is four words long and both verbs are worth having.

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (Genesis 2:15, King James Version)

To dress it. And to keep it.

Dress, in that old English, means to tend, to work, to attend to. It is a word about ongoing attention rather than about an end state. A garden is dressed today and it will be dressed again next week, and nothing about that repetition means anything failed.

Keep means to guard, to preserve, to hold on to. It is the same word used later about keeping a promise and keeping a flock. It carries protection in it, and it assumes the thing being kept is worth keeping.

You are the thing being kept rather than the thing being corrected, and keeping has never once been done to something nobody thought was worth it. Scripture in Genesis 2 uses that word for guarding a flock and for holding to a promise, and the Holy Spirit is what settles a woman inside a word that assumes she is worth guarding.

Neither one of them contains a fault. Neither one of them has a completion where you check the result. And the garden they are applied to is described two verses earlier as good.

You are given work to do on something already called good, and neither of those two verbs has ever once implied that anything was wrong. It is written in Genesis 2 that the man was put in the garden to dress it and to keep it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a woman the vocabulary she has been missing.

Now put those two words where fixing has been.

Dressing your skin. Keeping your skin. Read those slowly, because they do something entirely different in the chest than the other word does.

There is no verdict in either of them. There is no before and after. There is attention, and protection, and the plain assumption that this is a thing worth attending to, which is the assumption that has been absent from your bathroom for thirty years.

You are dressing and keeping something that was called good before you got there, and there has never once been a fault in that job description. The Spirit of God is what changes the verb a woman is using on her own body, and the written word says He put him into the garden to dress it and to keep it.

Something you would do anyway

So here is the assignment, and it is a test rather than a task.

Tonight, do one thing for your skin that you would still do if nothing about it ever changed.

That is the whole test and it sorts everything instantly.

If you would stop doing it the moment you knew it made no difference, then it was fixing, and it was never care, whatever it looked like from the outside.

You are able to keep doing a thing that changes nothing, and care has never once been paid out of results. Genesis 2 says He put him into the garden to dress it and to keep it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates keeping from correcting.

If you would do it anyway, because it is warm, because it feels like being looked after, because a body at the end of a day deserves something, then it is dressing and keeping, and it always was.

Most people find, running this test honestly, that one or two things survive it and several do not. That is useful information and it costs nothing to have.

And do the surviving thing slowly, and do not check anything afterward, because the check belongs to the other verb and it will drag the whole act back over the line.

You are able to do one thing that would still be worth doing if nothing ever changed, and care has never once needed a result to justify itself. The written word in Genesis 2 puts a man in a good garden to dress it and to keep it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that distinction real in a bathroom rather than only true on a page.