There is something almost offensively beautiful about the way children demand repetition.
“Again.”
Read the same book.
Sing the same song.
Push the swing.
Build the tower.
Knock it down.
Again.
And again.
And again.
We call it exhausting because we have forgotten how to be alive.
Chesterton noticed something profound about children: their appetite for repetition does not come from boredom. It comes from abundance. A child kicks his legs because he has too much life inside him to contain.
The grown-up wants novelty.
The child wants again.
And perhaps this tells us something about God.
Every morning, the sun rises. Every evening, it sets. Spring returns. The tides come in. The birds sing the same ancient songs. Daisies appear, one after another, seemingly identical, yet each one made by the hand of God.
He does not seem embarrassed by repetition.
He seems delighted by it.
We, meanwhile, have been trained to despise the ordinary.
We want the new house, the new experience, the new treatment, the new season, the new version of ourselves. We mistake novelty for life and routine for stagnation.
But what if repetition is not evidence that nothing is happening?
What if repetition is one of the ways God forms us?
The same dishes.
The same prayers.
The same lessons taught to children who seem determined to forget them by breakfast.
The same laundry.
The same Scripture read again because apparently we still have not understood it.
The same repentance.
The same forgiveness.
The same walk around the block.
The same ordinary Tuesday in which nothing particularly impressive happens, and yet somehow a life is being built.
Perhaps holiness is less glamorous than we imagined.
Perhaps maturity is learning to love what must be done again.
God does not seem tired of making mornings.
He does not seem bored with the seasons.
He does not look at another daisy and think, Really? Another one?
He keeps creating.
He keeps giving.
He keeps saying, in the language of creation:
Again.
Our Father is younger than we are.
And perhaps becoming like Him means recovering the childlike ability to look at the same beautiful thing for the thousandth time and still say,
“Again.”
B🤍
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