For Part One, Part Two, Part Three, or Part Five, make your choice and click away.
For today's quote, Bishop John H. Vandenberg gives a conversation between naturalist William Beebe and Theodore Roosevelt in his talk, "Turn Heavenward Our Eyes":
The Quote
" It calls to mind an incident I read
that tells of the naturalist, William Beebe,
who made a visit to another naturalist whose name was Theodore Roosevelt.
In describing the visit,
William Beebe said that each evening,
after a talk in Roosevelt’s home at Sagamore Hill,
the two men would go out on the lawn and gaze up at the sky
to see who could first detect that faint spot of light-mist
beyond the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus.
Then one or the other would recite:
“That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda.
It is as large as our Milky Way.
It is one of a hundred million galaxies.
It is 750,000 light-years away.
It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.”
After an interval Beebe reported
that Mr. Roosevelt would grin at him and say,
“Now I think we are small enough. Let’s go to bed.”
It's such a vivid story - two great men, Beebe and Roosevelt, reveling in that smallness that nature bestows on anyone who spends time out there.
I love gardening myself, and I've always noticed that no matter how fast the modern world goes, spending time outside slows me down in a significant way, down to the level of the natural world, which is slow and steady and powerful, like God, its Creator.
With the benefit of animation, we can experience that ourselves:
