We have never seen anything as beautiful as what we see when we walk out the front door.

Bill knows how I like to keep my birthday quiet! So he told you all about it - nice one! Anyway, one of the presents I was given was the complete DVD set of the TV series, From Earth to The Moon. It is the story of the whole Apollo effort to land a man on the moon.

I love it! And over the past weeks, I have been addicted.

And as usual, it has got me thinking, not  alot, but still thinking!



The story is amazing. In less than a decade the Americans went from putting one guy barley into space to landing two men on the moon and returning them back to earth. You can see why so many people think it is faked. it is just so out there!

And what it shows is...

Just what we can do when we put our minds to it. When we decide, YES this is what we are to do and lets do it. Did you know that at one stage there were over 400,000 employed in America working on the Apollo stuff?

And what fascinates me is what happened when the astronauts got out there. What did they do...?

They looked back.

Looked back in awe and what they had left behind.

The first men to travel around the moon did so on Christmas Eve 1968. They were so captivated by what they saw that they read from Genesis 1 on Christmas Day. they were amazed not just by the moon, but the beauty of the earth they had left behind. All alone in a universe looking back at a beautiful planet FULL of LIFE. BURSTING with LIFE.

Alan Bean, who landed on the moon on Apollo 12, the one after Armstrong and Aldrin had this to say:

'We've been looking out of telescopes for three hundred years; we've been sending probes out into space, and we have never seen anything as beautiful as what we see when we walk out the front door.'

Next term, The Hub, our 20s and 30s group is going to hold an evening on caring for the environment. Here's hoping we can somehow capture that sense of wonder the astronauts had when they looked back at our beautiful world.

Here's hoping we can somehow grasp the importance of paul's statement that the whole of creation is groaning as if in childbirth awaiting its redemption.

Here's hoping that somehow we can grasp what it is to be the church, and to be prophetic when it comes to the world around us.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.

one day it will be again.