Glorious Monotony

"A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE." —G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 42 (paragraphing added)


I was considering this quote by G.K. Chesterton (which I saw in a blog post from DesiringGod.org) in light of a recent question posed by a friend in a status update, that is, when the Bible talks about God's mercies being new every morning, are they different or simply the same mercies renewed? And my thought was that they are the same mercies: life, breath, etc., but renewed by God daily. I think this quote relates to that in that we as human beings are always looking for the next thing, the new toy. We are like the philosophers at Mars Hill in Acts 17, who were always ready to hear some new philosophy, but scoffed at Paul's archaic monotheism. We look for a new experience. This is a temptation for believers, especially after that first period of new life in Christ where there is a sense of wonder all the time when we read His Word and meditate on it. Inevitably that passion wanes to a degree, and the temptation is to try to recapture it with new experiences and new methods. But it seems that the Christian life has a certain monotony to it. We preach the gospel to ourselves daily, and the gospel hasn't changed. We read God's Word daily, going over texts that we may have read multiple times before. We seek to establish godly habits, to be steady. There is a certain monotony to that, but it is a glorious monotony in which we glory in old truths about the Ancient of Days who never changes.