In Chapter 4 (A “Dee-Dah Day”: The Practice of Celebration) of The Life You’ve Always Wanted, author John Ortberg describes a time when he was giving his 3 young children a bath. One of his daughters was out of the tub and John was trying to dry her off, but she joyfully was running around and around in circles, repeatedly singing “dee dah day”. Impatient and irritable, John told his daughter to hurry up. She replied with a very profound question: “Why?”
Pastor Ortberg notes that when we are preoccupied with ourselves we are incapable of pouring out our joy to others or experiencing the myriad delights God offers to us each day. Unless we understand the importance of joy to God, we’ll never comprehend joy’s significance in our lives.
The uninhibited joy we see in the happiest child is just a fraction of the joy that is in God’s heart. In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton noted that children love to “do it again”, that they thrive on things being repeated and unchanged. Adults, however, rarely rise to that level of enthusiasm:
“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 he has never got tired of making them.”
