Revel Guest Post: Revel in Repetition by Mystie Winckler

Repetition.

Doesn’t it just make you hang your head and sigh?

Over and over and over and over again, we wash the dishes, fold the laundry, make the meals, sweep the floor, read aloud a book, correct a math page. There’s never an end in sight to the repetitions of these tasks.

I spent years fighting against repetition as much as I could. Rather than learn to do a job well, I examined every task to see if it could be eliminated instead. If I was going to sweep the floor tomorrow anyway, why do it today at all? And that question is as valid the next day as it was the day before. Who says the floor has to be swept anyway? (fyi – this was when I had only a baby and a low-key toddler; my floor today looks in 24 hours like what my floor them looked like after 5 days or more.). How many of these boring tasks could I get myself out of, especially now that I was in charge with my own house?

Ah, how much time and energy I wasted. If instead I had worked to learn good habits, the road to keeping my head above water homeschooling five active kids and living a life on top of that might not have been so painful. Instead, it was painful.

And as I worked to learn to do those mundane, tedious tasks more efficiently rather than saying that not doing them at all is the most efficient, I also read and thought about it all – of course. These people who write books like Home Comforts and Hidden Art of Homemaking, surely they are just a different personality type – one that naturally likes dull repetition. It seemed exceedingly unnatural to me.

Eventually I was able to let go of my angst and my excuses. I admitted that the problem really was me and not the way the world works. It was that fundamental repentance and submission (which is the opposite of angst) that finally allowed real progress to begin. 

One passage that was instrumental in bringing about this mindset shift was a paragraph by G.K. Chesterton:

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.