Awe and Wonder

Late in life, Charles Darwin wrote in his autobiography: "I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds...gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare...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 to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost any taste for pictures or music...I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight that it formerly did...My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts..."
(an excerpt from a Christianity Today article by Virginia Stem Owens)

God has placed inside all of us a sense of wonder and awe. However, it seems the older we get, the more our lives are exposed to, we begin to lose that wonder. Charles Darwin tried to explain everything by pure natural science and in the process he lost something, his sense of wonder. He no longer could enjoy that "exquisite delight" that nature once brought him. Children are full of wonder. Their favorite question is "why". Everything is new to them. As we grow older we attempt to answer all the why questions. We fill our minds with general laws and large collections of facts and we fail to see the mystery in everyday life. 

I am not advocating ignorance. I feel often people are just too stubborn to admit reality and face up to the facts, but I am advocating a new sense of awe and wonder. We can have assurance in the unknown. When we walk outside, we don't always need to know where rain comes from, or where the clouds go on a sunny day, or why the grass is green, or why grandpa has lost all his hair. We can just imagine, and say "Wow! That really is something. I wonder..."