The People Walking in Darkness Have Seen a Great Light

Maybe you can remember 1968. If not, I’m sure we can all remember a time when things seemed hopeless and despair gripped our hearts. In 1968 things sure seemed hopeless. America was bitterly divided over the Vietnam War. The year began with a series of coordinated enemy attacks launched against our troops, battles that would collectively become known as the Tet offensive. Over 1,500 American soldiers were lost in January alone. College campuses were fraught with violence and unrest - both political parties’ presidential conventions were marred by rioting and tear gas. On April 4, 1968, a giant of peace, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, silencing his voice and unleashing race riots around the country. Whole communities went up in flames including the Watts section of Los Angeles. People were frightened. Could anyone stop the slide into anarchy? Many thought Robert F. Kennedy might be the leader that the country so desperately needed, but on June 5th after winning the California Democratic Primary, he, too, was assassinated as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel. By December 1968 over 14,500 families had lost their sons to the fighting in Vietnam, the highest annual total for the war. Was there any hope left to be found for this dark year?

On December 21, three men, William Anders, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman sat strapped into the Apollo 8 command module atop a Saturn V rocket. Only one year earlier, their good friends Grissom, White and Chaffee had burned to death during a countdown simulation on the same launch pad. Now, the first moon-shot since that ill-fated fire was about to blast off. “T-minus Three…Two…One…” The massive Saturn V rocket engines roared to life creating the most horsepower and thrust ever recorded from a man-made vehicle, lifting the mammoth spaceship from the launch pad. Apollo 8 cleared the tower and the brave crew headed for the moon.

They reached it on Christmas Eve. A live TV broadcast was scheduled to be beamed from the tiny capsule as it hurtled through the blackness of space. That broadcast would garner the largest audience in the history of television up till then, as all eyes and ears on earth turned towards the history-making event about to occur in the heavens. As the Apollo 8 spacecraft achieved lunar orbit, the three astronauts passed, for the first time in history, to a place where truly “no man had ever gone before”…behind the moon. There, they were in a complete blackout. In utter darkness, they were cut off from all communication, without any connection whatsoever to the earth, to any sunlight or even a human voice--entirely alone. After what must have seemed like an eternity, the three intrepid astronauts witnessed something never before seen by human eyes--a lunar sunrise and, as they went a little further, they saw something even more dramatic, an “Earthrise.”

As the great blue and white swirling marble rose above them the radio crackled with a signal from 26,000 miles away. “Apollo 8, this is Houston. Do you read?”

            “Houston, this is Apollo 8. We have message for all the people of earth: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light, Day and the darkness He called, Night. And the evening and the morning; the first day.” 

What they did in that moment focused the entire world on a great truth at a time when the earth so desperately needed to hear it -a time not unlike like today. God, the creator and sustainer of all things, is in control. He spoke light into darkness. And not just at creation, but when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the light of the world, the light of all men, shone into the darkness. He still speaks light into our darkness.  When all seems lost, when all seems hopeless, when you feel as though you are on the backside of the moon and no one can even hear you…God can. He is the source of all hope. Reach out to Him, and, if you know that hope, take the Light and reach out to others struggling in darkness.