Exult in Monotony

Raising small children, especially in the summertime, without the guard rail rhythms of the school year, can sometimes feel like an experiment in prolonged monotony. Blink twice (at least in my home), and my children are building a fort in the living room on top of yesterday's floor-is-lava pillows that I swore I put back on the couch (?) and the oatmeal is already over-baked, and they'll never eat it anyway, and then it's across town to swimming lessons. This race will continue tomorrow and the next day, and the day after that. Once the heat ticks north of 90 degrees, I can generally count on my children getting faster and younger and myself getting older and slower, just trying to keep up. I was grumpy and tired and guarding my mug of coffee the other morning, when I remembered this quote from the always whimsical-formidable G.K. Chesterton:

"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."

I remember dog-earring this page from Chesterton's Orthodoxy and reading it over and over again, how easily he dismantled my assumptions about the mechanics of the universe, simply in wondering if the living God, the Maker of all new life, acts younger than I do. What if the world is not like a clock, everything fueled only by the inevitable, but a gift from a Child making daisies only because He likes them? Chesterton takes the complexities of cosmology and places them comfortably in the hands of a toddler.

I was in college when Chesterton made me young again. Now, it seems I need to be reminded, if I'm not as enamored by the woodpecker feather my child is eagerly lifting up to me, or the clear pool water, reflective, buoying him as he graduates from dog paddle to freestyle. 

​​​​​​​What is on repeat for you and your family this summer? Chesterton is right, and so are my children. What are they trying to teach me about God in their boundless energy toward all summer is offering them? May we not just 'keep up' with their shifting summer energies; may we not give them and the world they want to show us only our minimum attention.

LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is the Vice President of the Eighth Day Institute Board of Directors and a husband, father, and writer happily living in Wichita, Kansas.