Hope, From 238,900 Miles Away

Over Easter weekend, in between spending time with my family, going to church, and taking naps on the couch, I stumbled upon a short message from space that’s been captivating a lot of people online.

Even though I grew up in the early Space Shuttle era in the 80s and 90s, I’m no space buff, but I’ve always had a reverence for the expansiveness of the universe. It’s one of those things that is beyond my comprehension, and I don’t even try to fully grasp it. I just respect its beauty.

As I watched and listened to Artemis II pilot Victor Glover, something about it felt distant. Not disconnected, but almost like it didn’t belong to the moment we’re living in. It felt like he had access to something the rest of us don’t, a perspective that most of don’t.

Here’s a man sent to space to visit the moon for the first time in 50 years, and yet his gaze was fixed on Earth. The place he’s called home for almost five decades looked different from 238,900 miles away, and that distance seemed to bring something into focus rather than take it away. Instead of talking about the mission or the magnitude of what he was doing, he talked about us. He talked about this place we call home and reminded us that, in the vastness of everything else, this is where we exists together.

Whew.

If you know me personally or if you’re a part of the Bridge Builder community, you know that “remain hopeful” is consistent encouragement of mine. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s necessary. It’s a reminder I give to others, but also one I constantly need for myself.

Because life is life…need I say more.

Whether it’s the weight of the economy, the tension in politics, wars happening across the world, the loss of people we love, or just the very real human emotion of fear, all of it is constantly in our face, and it becomes hard to see beyond it. Over time, it can narrow our perspective to the point where hope starts to feel distant or nonexistent.

Maybe that’s why his words stayed with me.

In that moment, he was able to do something most of us rarely take the time to do. He zoomed out and reminded us that in the middle of everything we’re carrying and navigating, there is still beauty here. There is still something meaningful about the fact that we share this space together, even when it doesn’t always feel like it.

We are not as separate as we sometimes believe, and we are more connected than we often acknowledge.

And while most of us may never see Earth from that distance, I don’t think we have to in order to experience that shift. Sometimes it looks like taking a moment to pause, lifting our heads from what’s directly in front of us, and remembering that the people around us are a part of the same story we are.

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly" - Martin Luther King Jr.

I don’t know if anything about our external reality changes overnight, but I do know that when our perspective shifts, even slightly, it can create enough space for hope to find its way back in and transform how we care for one another.

And lately, I’ve been reminded that sometimes, that’s enough.