The great naturalist William Beebe and his close friend Teddy Roosevelt did more than any other two human beings to preserve America's natural beauty and pristine spaces. But Beebe acknowledged they knew their place in the universe.
Beebe is quoted as telling this story: "After an evening of talk, we would go out on the lawn and search the heavens until we found the faint spot of light mist in the constellation Pegasus and one of us would recite: 'That is the Spiral Galaxy of Andromeda. It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galazies. It is 750 thousand light years away. It consists of 100 billion suns—each larger than our sun.' After a moment, Col. Roosevelt would grin at me and say, 'Now I think we are small enough. Let's go to bed.'"
Here were two giants of the 20th century, and they prepared to rest for the night by considering how miniscule they were in God's creation. I like that. A lot.
Lately, we've had our fill of folks who got too big for their britches. I won't recite the litany of names. It's too depressing, unless you've got a late-night TV show and you need fodder for folly. If you want to come up with names, click over to a news website.
It seems so much of the world's problems occur because individuals think more of themselves than they ought. They've gotten too big.
If you consider the heavens, you gain much-needed perspective. The fascinating Very Short List website pointed me toward helpful information. VSL tells about Nick Risinger , a young marketing manager who quit his day job to photograph the night sky. It's called the Photopic Sky Survey, and it's composed of 37,440 synchronized photos of the night sky.
Click on this link to visit the Photopic Sky Survey and see the night sky as never before. Tool around the site and try to comprehend tens of millions of stars, nearly all of them larger than our sun.
The Psalmist was onto something:
"When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels
and crowned them with glory and honor" (Psalm 8:3-5).
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