Astronaut's message brings reminder of who we are

It's worth hearing again, that Easter message from space.

Victor Glover, a NASA astronaut who recently piloted the Artemis II lunar mission, said in part, “I don't have anything prepared, but I'm glad you asked. You guys are talking to us because we're in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you're on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe. In all of this emptiness — this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe — you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.

Whether you celebrate Easter or not, whether you believe in God or not, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing and that we've gotta get through this together.”

The Bible says of God thousands of years ago, “He hangs the Earth on nothing.” How did Job know to write this? It is, in my mind, one of the many proofs of the inspired word of God. Who could have dreamed back then that humans would rocket into space and actually see the Earth hanging on nothing.

Just as I am writing, the news showed a clip of the four Artemis II astronauts expressing their “at home” thoughts. Commander Reid Wiseman reflected, “It's a special thing to be a human. And it's a special thing to be on planet Earth.”

Victor Glover added, “I want to thank God. The gratitude of seeing what we saw, doing what we did and being with those I was with, is too big to just be in one body.” He said he has not processed it yet. It is not too conservative to say he will be doing that the rest of his life.

I have seen so little of the Earth. I am not a world traveler — except for a brief foray in Europe 45 years ago. I have not even been to all 50 states of the United States. But I have shared in some incredible things. In Alaska, I was well north of the Arctic Circle on the frozen Beaufort Sea at an Inupiat whale harvest. I stood on the ice staring at the open black water — knowing I was on top of the world.

It was an immense feeling. How must it have been to see the top of the world from space? I can fractionally — a sliver — fathom Victor Glover's “too big for one body.”

For me to see the newly landed space capsule floating in the ocean, looking puny in the vast sea, and to think of it hundreds of thousands of miles in space, circling the moon — and the puniness that must have looked like, with those four humans inside — is incomprehensible.

The psalmist David asks from earth, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, The moon and the stars, which You have ordained, What is man that You take a thought of him, And the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the angels, And You crown him with glory and majesty.”

Victor confirms David's musings from space millennia later: “We are the same thing. And I'm trying to tell you — just trust me: You are special.”

Carol Shirk Knapp is the author of The Preacher's Kid column.