Again, again!

Thanks to Maggi Dawn's blog, I'm once again reminded how little G.K.Chesterton I know - and nudged (again) to go read him and drink deep.

She posts (in the context of yet another day with snow in Cambridge) a wonderful quotation which captures the infant joy in repetition that we've long-since lost - as any parent who's played "garages" or "tea party" twenty times in a single morning will testify.

I love the sense Chesterton picks up of God the creator's intimate involvement in each day - we don't believe in a Deist, distant, "wind it up and stand back 'til it's all over" creator, but in a God who's attention is focused on that which he has made, is making and continues to remake - and will one day make utterly new.

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.

We think of "growing up" as a completely and unarguably good thing - what if we find that, in our sin, growing up loses us something so precious, Jesus' calls us to rediscover it - is there something of that in Matthew 18?