Humbled

G. K. Chesterton,

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.

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.

How beautiful every sunrise and sunset is, so beautiful that I am often brought to my knees in awe. I will never be able to achieve such beauty, wonderment, and perfection in my own art, and so how much more inspiring are those things which are consistently beautiful. To have so much life in every repetition, to have so much energy in every good thing that it never gets old, or that maybe its age strengthens its beauty. It's timelessness, evidenced by its energy, raises against the fickle human a bulwark that is either awful or comforting, and always strong.

Such is the sun.

How much more is its Creator? And how much more that this Creator raises His bulwark on which you lean comfortably against the onslaught of the wicked powers that claw almost as restlessly against you. How much more that the work is finished, is finishing, and will be finished inside of you, the broken and the battered. Such is the difficulty of trashing the sandy hut of your flesh, and instead calling that infinite Bastion standing incomparably taller than the opposition, home.