If we begin our Lenten journey in a spirit of discouragement, it is good to remember Abram and Sarai’s discouragement when God’s promises were not quickly fulfilled. The signs of God’s faithfulness are all around us if we but look. More importantly, taking part in God’s great promise may be the first step to believing God and having it reckoned to us as righteousness.
What do you see when you look up in the heavens? God? The awesome majesty of the Creator? Or a void which stretches across meaningless light years to encompass nothing?
It’s all in how we connect the dots that determines what pictures we see.
In the early days of the space race the Soviet Union was officially an atheist nation, so regardless of whatever beliefs individual cosmonauts might have had, they were required to proclaim that God was missing in space and history.
In August of 1961, Gherman Titov, only 26 at the time and until 2021 the youngest person to reach space, spent a day orbiting the earth, the second human to do so. Upon his return, he paid tribute to the giants on whose shoulders he stood. Describing his thoughts as he stood looking at the launchpad, Titov wrote about “the gigantic efforts of will and thought of the great godless ones of the past — Archimedes and Copernicus, Galileo and Bruno ....1
He was even more explicit in a visit to the United States in May of 1962, where he was quoted as saying “Sometimes people are saying that God is out there. I was looking around attentively all day but I didn’t find anybody there. I saw neither angels nor God.”2
But as C.S. Lewis, who followed the early days of the space race with interest and skepticism, noted:
The Russians, I am told, report that they have not found God in outer space. On the other hand, a good many people in many different times and countries claim to have found God, or been found by God, here on earth. ... Space-travel really has nothing to do with the matter. To some, God is discoverable everywhere; to others, nowhere. Those who do not find him on earth are unlikely to find him i
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