As the summer comes to a close and it starts to get really busy again, I thought that this lesson that I just came across in a church newsletter might be worth taking to heart.
Charles Darwin loved scientific studies. He devoted his life to them including his five year voyage on the Beagle. But his devotion to study came at a cost.
Here is what he noted in his autobiography.
“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. . . .My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. . . .The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin Page 26)
The newsletter where I found the story concluded with this basic message, “We become what we behold” (John Piper). There is a text that sums this up, it reads, “Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.” (Phil. 4:8)
No matter what your faith preferences, it is probably good advice to take time to stop and smell the roses.
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