The world was unraveling in 1968, but I was mostly concerned with cartoons and the taste of garden hose water. It took a grainy broadcast from the dark side of the moon to show me a wholeness I didn’t have a name for yet.
The world was unraveling, but I was busy watching cartoons.
Scary 68
In 1968, history was a slow-motion wreck. We’d been told the war in Vietnam was winding down, but the Tet Offensive proved the end was nowhere in sight.
In April, Dr. King was gone. Two months later, the country was shocked when Robert F. Kennedy was struck down by another assassin.
By August, the news was full of hand-to-hand fighting and tear gas in the streets of Chicago outside the Democratic National Convention.
To the adults, it must’ve felt like the very floor of the country was dropping out. But to an eight-year-old, “the news” was just a low hum in the background.
My parents would spend their evenings leaning into our 19-inch Zenith. When Bob Hope went to Vietnam, I remember them searching the crowd in drab green fatigues. They were looking for the face of a neighbor kid in the sea of soldiers. They never found him.
I was usually outdoors, playing “Army” with the neighborhood kids and taking long drinks from a garden hose. It tasted of hot rubber and iron pipes, but we didn’t care. Back then, water was water.
Life was just a weekly countdown to Saturday mornings, and then in December after school was out, to uncovering the mysteries wrapped in colorful paper and sitting under the Christmas tree.
Command Performance
Then came the “hush.”
It started on this day in 1968. Apollo 8 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, headed for the dark side of the moon.
By Christmas Eve, my dad called us all into his room. It was a command performance for a miracle. We stood there in that tiny bedroom watching a grainy, black-and-white moon slide beneath three men in a glorified tin can.
It looked like something out of a comic book. We watched our own blue world rise over the grey horizon, hanging in the dark. Then astronaut Bill Anders’ voice started.
“In the beginning,” he said, “God created the heavens and the earth.”
Hearing those words coming from the dark of space made the Bible feel as big as the sky. For a minute, the playground and the mission were part of the same thing. It was a wholeness I didn’t have a name for yet.
No Press Gallery
It’s the same old story, really.
Apollo 8 was a triumph of the famous—men tracked by every radar dish on the planet. But the greatest mission in history didn’t have a press gallery. There were no cameras and no fanfare.
It happened in Bethlehem, a small, unremarkable outpost that had the inescapable smell of livestock and trail dust. It went unnoticed by the world, known only to a few shepherds who’d heard the news directly from the mouth of an angel.
It certainly wasn’t the entrance a PR firm would plan.
But then God tells us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.”
One mission used the sharpest minds of a generation to climb up toward the light. The other saw the Light descend into our mess in humility.
One event was considered great in its time and the other insignificant. But in the hearts of believers, those events are re-ranked.
Between the toys, the “gifts” of socks and underwear, and my mom’s turkey dinner, the world felt right to me in December 1968. But that was a child’s perspective. Had I been grown? I doubt I would’ve felt the same.
Still on the Throne
Now, looking back more than fifty years later, I realize that while the world wasn’t right, the God who sent His Son was still on His throne.
He had a plan then.
And He has one now, to one day make it all right.
