Our children (and perhaps me too) enjoy the Pixar shorts, “Forky Asks a Question.” One of them, “What is a friend?” Involves Forky asking a coffee cup which he thinks is named “What? No!” about friendship. The coffee cup has that name because Forky sees the mother holding it and the whole time she holds it, while on the phone, she keeps saying, “What? No!” Towards the end of the clip Forky accidentally breaks the cup and yells out, “What? No!”
As I said, my children really like this one. And this morning before school, they kept repeating the end scene. Specifically, Forky yelling “What? No!!!” and then they’d laugh and laugh. And do it again. And again. And again.
As a parent, if you can’t handle repetition then you are in for a rude surprise because children repeat themselves or want to do the same thing (often with you) over and over and over again.
Today, while listening to them quote this video and laugh, over and over again, I couldn’t help but think of what G.K. Chesterton wrote so many years ago about God. As Chesterton wrote, “The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. 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.”
That is from Chesterton’s great work, Orthodoxy, which I highly recommend. And it is from chapter 4, “The Ethics of Elfland” which is a chapter every Christian should read. You can do so for free here.
So as my children laughed at the same joke repeatedly, I couldn’t help but think about how old I have grown compared to God. God is forever young. He delights in repetition. Perhaps this is part of what Jesus meant when he said, “Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:4).