From guest blogger, Mike Hosey, and Elder at Fellowship Church.
Sir Isaac Newton once argued that whatever valuable
discoveries he made were more the result of patient attention than they were of
any other talent. That means he believed that his greatest scientific
discoveries owed more to his patient observations than they did to his great
intellect!
This truth is really not that hard to understand. If you don't pay attention to the world
around you, well, you're going to miss the world around you.
Usually, we notice this in the negative sense.
For instance, the other day I wasn't paying attention as I
was driving home from Gainesville. As a result, I did not slow my vehicle as I
entered an area with a reduced speed limit. As you might have guessed, I was
pulled over by the local police. Luckily, the kind officer let me off with only
a warning and a coloring book for Joshua.
And needless to say, I will pay more attention in that part of town from
now on -- or at least until I get lazy again.
In a situation like that, it is easy to learn what we missed
because there is an unpleasant consequence.
Unfortunately, we don't usually notice the usefulness of
paying attention in the positive sense.
All around us are beautiful things made by a surpassingly
beautiful God. Because we are not paying
attention we miss this beauty (and the beauty of its author) probably every
hour of every day. And because there is no immediate unpleasant consequence for
missing this beauty, we tragically never even know that we've missed it!
How many times do we miss a sky full of stars right above
us, or a beautiful meadow outside our speeding car's window?
But worst of all is when we miss noticing the spiritual,
emotional and physical needs of our fellow human beings, and the beauty that
comes from serving them -- because there is great beauty in seeing a person
changed from a sacrificial good deed.
So like Sir Isaac, let us use patient attention to make our greatest
discoveries.
