When I was 9, I remember a warm summer evening sitting crossed-legged on my living room floor with my sister, absolutely glued to our old black and white TV set. I also remember it was my dad’s excitement that trumped the routine and allowed us to stay up past our 8:00 bedtime. The date? July 20th, 1969 and Neil Armstrong was about to take a small step that forever justified humankind’s ambition for exploration.
The DVD series entitled, The Moon is filling our evenings of late as we hunker down for snow. I find myself caught in the wonder of it all. As a person of faith, I believe in grace; the grace I receive to love those around me, the grace to respond to God’s promptings and will, the grace in order to choose well toward the hope of living one day with my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. The grace I don’t often consider is the grace that keeps me breathing, regulates my temperature, keeps my feet on the ground, and provides me with food and water. The Moon series brings the latter grace to the fore. One cannot help but be humbled and I catch myself wondering at our collective hubris when we think these gifts are our right. Or worse, we don’t think much about them at all.
As we consider the hope of travel in the months ahead and find ourselves re-thinking the money it costs, the time it takes, the distance from loved ones it creates, we are also reminded that for no other reason than a longing to explore do we invest in such travel. Maybe it’s not a lucrative investment when you consider the return – especially if my memory fails in years to come – but I believe it reflects the true us. If you think my thoughts odd, I’m okay with that. Those guys who went to the moon were a pretty peculiar bunch too.
