Do It Again

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” — Psalm 19:1 (KJV)

People often think that because nature repeats itself, sunrise after sunrise, daisy after daisy, it must be a dead machine running on its own. Chesterton turned this idea on its head with one of the most loved passages in the book.

He points out that children love repetition. When they find a game or a joke they enjoy, they say, “Do it again!” and the grown-up does it again until they are exhausted. That isn’t because children are dull. It’s because they are so full of life.

“For grownup people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.”

Then he imagines this:

“It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.”

Maybe every daisy is alike not because a machine is stamping them out, but because God makes each one separately and has never got tired of making them. Chesterton says perhaps God “has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

Isn’t that a beautiful way to see the world? The sunrise you saw this morning wasn’t a machine going through the motions. It might be God delighting in his creation and saying, “Again!”

This changed how Chesterton thought about everything. He wrote: “I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.” And: “I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a storyteller.”

If life is a story, then your life is part of it too. You aren’t an accident in a machine. You are a character in a story written by a Storyteller who loves what he has made.

One thing to do this week: watch a sunrise or sunset this week, or just look at the sky. Imagine God saying, “Do it again!” Read Psalm 19:1–6 and thank God for one thing in creation that he keeps on making.