252,756 miles from home. God was there. Already.
Three days ago, four human beings were 252,756 miles from home.
You read that too quickly. Not 252 miles. Not 2,500. Two hundred and fifty-two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-six miles from everything you treasure, find reassuring or familiar. Breath-taking and at a distance from Earth greater than any human being has ever been in history, and they did a Lewis Hamilton drift around the far side of the moon and suddenly… gazed at it with their own eyes for the very first time since humans were created.
Astronaut Christina Koch floated over to the window and looking out in awe said, “That is the dark side. That is something we have never seen before.”
She was right. And she was also, without knowing it, bearing witness to something far larger than a space mission.
Because, 252,756 miles away from home, God was already there. Waiting. No travel necessary.
Not arriving. Not observing from a distance. Already there. Filling that silence the way he fills everything – completely, without beginning, without effort. The far side of the moon has been hidden from human sight since the dawn of creation, and not one square metre of it has ever been beyond his reach. David knew this without a space programme. “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there, if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Psalm 139:7-8). The man was writing theology that would take us three millennia and a Star-trek rocket ship to even begin to feel the weight of.
The evidence of God’s presence in that unreachable place wasn’t written in fire or thunder. It was written in the crew themselves; four friends on an adventure, 252,756 miles from home, with beating hearts and breathing lungs and minds no ecstatic with awe and wonder. Koch looked back at Earth from that mind-numbing distance and with a misguided but understandable comment said, “Everything we need, Earth provides. And that is somewhat of a miracle – one that you can’t truly know until you’ve had the perspective of the other.”
She was groping for something she didn’t quite have words or vocabulary for. It was about flesh and blood made in the express image of the Creator, arriving at the place he never left, and feeling the immense weight of it in their bones, minds and hearts. Seeing the unseen, not for a second or two, but gazing, blinking, staring for nearly 40 minutes.
That’s what glory does, often when you are lost in awe and wonder as you worship. Sometimes as you look into scripture. You think you’ve grasped it, and then it opens into something larger. It happened to me in the minutes I became a Christian where it seemed to me that GOD was in the room and I was in SO much trouble – only to meet a deluge of mercy, grace and love. Here, Isaiah walks into the temple and is undone – not by a small, manageable holiness, but by a presence so vast barely the hem of God’s robe fills the entire house (Isaiah 6:1). The seraphim cry holy three times because once could never be enough. Paul prays in Ephesians 3 that we’d know “the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge” – and he knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s asking you to grasp what simply cannot be grasped. Every fresh encounter with God’s infinite glory doesn’t exhaust it, it merely widens your capacity to receive more.
252,756 miles from home. The farthest any human being has ever travelled. And what did they find on the hidden face of creation? Craters filled with history, ancient basins from day four of creation. (I can’t bring myself to say billions of years!) Eight retina’s squinting at the sun’s corona blazing in an eclipse no human eye had ever witnessed from that place, and until now, only ever just imagined.
For the astronauts it was like gate-crashing a private, intimate moment, creation, doing what it has always done – declaring the glory of the one who made it, whether anyone was watching or not.
You cannot outrun the glory of God, neither can you find the edge of it. Every time you think you’ve reached the final edges of it, a final frontier, you discover you are still in the foyer.
Eternity will be full of these moments.
