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Made for Wonder

ByKelly Keller

The world will never lack wonders; what it lacks is wonder. We grow blind not because the light is dim, but because we forget to look. The moment a man learns to marvel again, he steps back into the richness of reality. – G. K. Chesterton

Over the past few weeks, we have been treated to the amazing journey of the Artemis II astronauts. These four souls traveled farther from Earth than any humans ever have, and—lucky us—they want to tell us all about it. It would be strange if they didn’t want to talk about it; a good bit of their jobs is reporting their findings.

But it’s clear in listening to these four gifted, intelligent scientists that they have come back changed by this trip. If you listen to any of their news conferences or Q&As, they struggle to sum up what they saw. Words fail them as they try to communicate the experience of being so far away and so small in the sky; they cannot correctly or completely tell what they saw. One of the gentlemen even related how he had to call for a chaplain upon landing, and he burst into tears upon seeing the man’s cross when he entered. He couldn’t explain it.

What they experienced is multifaceted, and I’m certain there are some things that they will never be able to say in a way that’s fully satisfying to them. The saying “you’d have to see it to believe it” applies to these people’s experience in a new and different way.

In some ways, even though they are superstars at the moment, they were made “right-sized” in a way none of us non-astronauts ever will be. They were given the chance to put our Earth and the solar system into perspective, at least a little bit. They knew how far apart these celestial bodies are. They saw how big everything is. Most of us are toddling around here down on Earth, living our tiny lives and thinking we’re much bigger than we are.

That’s not to say our lives are insignificant; they’re not. They’re just small.

The astronauts knew they were dependent—dependent on the staff back at home, guiding them; dependent on the engineers and designers who’d worked for years to develop and build their ships; dependent on the weather; dependent on the forces of physics to keep doing what we’ve always observed them doing. They were tiny humans adrift, at the mercy of so many giant things.

But then—aren’t we all? It’s just easier to ignore down here.

We Christians believe that God made us as images of himself (Genesis 1:26), to reflect his glory. Sometimes—often—we get things backwards and work for our own glory instead. When we do, we are ignoring the view out the window: the one of the earth setting behind the moon, of the myriad of stars, of the blinding light coming back at us from the sun. We are ignoring the ways in which we are kept, cared for, and hemmed in behind and before (Psalm 139:5). We are forgetting that we, too, are dependent.

Suddenly we perceive the universe as spinning around us instead.

One of the ways God granted to us to combat this self-glorifying tendency is the lavish beauty of the created universe. I think that’s what made this moon mission so wondrous: humans were made to marvel, and these four got a front-row seat. They saw it. They witnessed the beauty. And they marveled. This is what we were made to do.

Oh, Lord God! You yourself made the heavens and earth by your great power and with your outstretched arm. Nothing is too difficult for you! –Jeremiah 32:17

In case you’d like to marvel more: more Artemis mission photos.

Kelly Keller
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