Spring is here. Easter is approaching. The stores are full of chocolate, artery-clogging candy bunnies, marshmallow chicks and enough plastic grass to pasture a large dairy farm. Churches offer sunrise services, Easter brunches, cantatas, programs and Resurrection messages. Each year feels the same, and somewhere deep inside, you respond to the frenzy around you with a resounding been-there-done-that yawn.

It’s not that you don’t like Easter, or that you don’t appreciate the result of Christ’s resurrection. It’s just that it’s nothing, well … new. Over time, repeated events tend to lose their impact … punch … pizzazz. So you sit pizzazzless through celebrations and services, remembering a time when the empty tomb story held you entranced. There’s a tinge of guilt mixed in with your ennui, but you can’t seem to shake that desire for the Easter story to surprise you once again.

In the fourth chapter of his book Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton exposes the reason why repetition lulls the adult mind into a state of boredom. He writes, “All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork.” Now the “modern mind” of which Chesterton writes is the mind of a person living in 1908, but apparently little has changed since then. Today the same false assumption remains, proven by how highly we laud innovation and creativity while abandoning yesterday’s fad.

Anything new captures our attention and provides an initial thrill or rush, but once it fades we set out to find the next craze to appease our voracious, gotta-be-up-to-date appetites. For us, repeated experiences tend to lose value with each recurrence, but it is only a loss of perceived value. The experience, object or idea doesn’t change in any way, and it’s precisely this lack of change that results in our depreciation of that which once enthralled us. Doesn’t this seem ridiculous? We exult over something for a unique quality it exhibits, only to turn around and condemn the same thing for still having that unique quality. Is there no value in recurrences?

In Orthodoxy, Chesterton argues that our inability to enjoy repetition reveals a flaw in our characters, namely the flaw of sin. To explain, he notes that the sun rises every morning and that:

“It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His rising 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.”

Can you picture God clapping His hands with childlike glee each morning as the sun rises? Can you see Him fashioning His 10 billionth daisy with the same fascinated exuberance as daisy number one? Perhaps it changes your perception of God, or better yet, your perception of yourself. Sadly, we’ve lost our sense of wonder and amazement at the daily miracles that surround us. We’ve allowed them to become simple, commonplace and expected. We don’t even view them as miracles anymore.

In the same way, Easter’s annual appearance has become an expected, ordinary part of life, like the rising of the sun. The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. But does the fact that it reoccurs without fail make it any less amazing? Is a brilliant, orange-and-red-washed horizon lackluster because the sun already set yesterday? What a tragic state. In our inability to rejoice repeatedly over recurrent events, we cheat ourselves out of the delight God intended for us to have each day. The unchanging nature of daily events is not meant to bore us, but rather to display God’s unchanging love. We should wake up thinking, “Wow! Another sunrise? I can’t believe He did it again!” And each day should draw us closer to Him as He once again demonstrates His awesome power.

God is a joy giver, not a joy killer, and if He gets a kick out of making daisies, imagine His elation on that first Easter morning! Christ’s resurrection brought death’s defeat and salvation for the children God desperately loved. God called for the sun to “Do it again,” but then He did something new, something He had never done before. The anticipation in heaven must have been palpable. As angels held their breath and the sun burned away the dark, God called His Son back to Him — back to His home, His glory, His arms. Heaven exploded in celebration, and the wonder of that moment has yet to diminish in the celestial realms.

Each day, the marvel of that Resurrection morning is repeated when God says, “Do it again,” and Christ’s blood covers our sins. It doesn’t just happen on Easter, and the repetition of God’s grace each day doesn’t diminish its power or effect. If redemption didn’t recur like sunrises, we would find ourselves shamefully depraved and hopelessly separated from God every day.

It’s a pity we don’t retain the childlike admiration of daily miracles experienced in our youth. Recognition of our loss, however, can spur us on to rekindle that curious amazement and appreciation of everything we grow to deem banal and simple. But we can’t do it on our own. Our sin natures constantly pull us toward death, but the God of Life promises to renew us if we follow Him. So read the Easter story again and thank God that He never tires of encores.