bythemethod.com blog

We’ve just been celebrating the 40th anniversary of a person landing on the moon. I’ve enjoyed watching the programmes and I’m just old enough to remember when it actually happened. There is still something very exciting about seeing it happen and it’s a real testiment to the ability of people to achieve great things when they are motivated enough.

One of the programmes I watched was about the people who walked on the moon. Two things strike me in particular about their experience.

The first is that they are just very ordinary people who still seem a little amazed that they were the ones who got to go to the moon. There was a clip of Neil Armstrong’s parents on a T.V. programme when he had just been picked for the space programme and they were just very ordinary people – like anyone’s mum or dad. You don’t have to be superman to achieve great things.

The next thing came at the end of the programme. The astronauts were speaking about how the moon landings had affected them. Every one of them that were interviewed said something about the spiritual impact of looking back at the earth from such a distance and seeing this small blue disk hanging in a great expanse of black. This had a profound effect on them which even today 40 years after can bring tears to the eyes of an astronaut. It took that distance to make them think bigger than they normally did. At a moment when technology had given them the chance to walk on another world, and at a moment when they were surrounded by technology to keep them alive, and at a moment when we might suppose they would think about the brilliance of mankind, they thought of God.

So I want to encourage you to think bigger. Try to see beyond the obious stuff of life and see the bigger picture. Why not get a picture of the earth from a distance and spend time thinking about the bigger picture of life.