Many Christians have been raised by Christian parents in the church and have known God all of their lives, which is a truly beautiful blessing. Many Christians come to faith through an adult conversion experience, which can be sudden or it may grow over time. And many Christians fall somewhere in between, with some mix of belief, sense of the goodness of faith and moral grounding, and a growing understanding of its importance.

No matter who we are or where we fit into that complex stew, there comes a point of personal revelation that Jesus is Lord and we’ve got to respond to him.

The name John Newton may not ring much of a bell with many of us. But if I say that he wrote Amazing Grace, we recognize him as having written perhaps the most beloved Christian hymn of all time.

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Sometimes a full moon looks so big, so close, that it seems as though we could reach out and touch it: so beautiful, so close. Sometimes it is actually closer, but mainly it’s the atmosphere acting like a magnifying glass. But of course, we cannot touch it.  But a few people have. The first, of course, was Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” from Apollo XI. 

The world watched and everyone remembers exactly where they were in that moment.  Those of us in central Florida during the 1960’s had a front row seat. We could see the launches. If you went to Titusville or Cocoa Beach, you could feel the whole world shake.  I remember my parents getting my brother and me out of bed to watch Armstrong walk on the moon on TV.  It was exciting and is generally regarded as the greatest human technological achievement of all time.

But it wasn’t just a moment.

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We learn almost everything in two ways. Our senses tell us about the world around us and we think about what our senses tell us. Now we can extend our senses with technology, sensing things we cannot see or hear, and we can extend our thinking using computers. But the harder we look, and the better we get at analyzing and thinking, the questions grow faster than the answers.

For example, we can look into a night sky and see far too many stars to count. We can see more in the winter, when there is less humidity. We can see more when there is no light pollution. We can see even more from a high mountain out west, where it is really dry and clear. The stronger the telescope, the more stars we see. The best telescopes are in space. They have no atmosphere, no light pollution.

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