Hope - One Small Step for Man…
When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, he said those now immortal words, everything changed. We went from a people that had always been looking at the moon, dreaming about the moon, wondering about the moon, to a people who had been to the moon.
I remember staying up late with my dad to watch it live on TV(1). The images were not what we are accustomed to today, but it was clear enough. The re-enactment in the movie, First Man, is very good(2).
There was one man, standing alone on the surface of the moon. But he certainly wasn’t alone. Even Michael Collins, who was circling 50-some miles above in the Command Module, wasn’t really alone. They didn’t get there alone. NASA had a workforce somewhere around 400,000 people. There were around 3,000 engineers working on the Saturn V rocket, which had around 3 million pieces. There was nothing about the Apollo 11 mission that was “alone.”
Hope is like the Apollo missions. It takes a team with lots of different skills, talents, abilities, gifts, And like the trip to the moon, no one travels alone. It takes:
Time
Energy
Determination
Failure
Restarting
No one arrives at hope through a single decision or action. There is no such thing as instant hope. Hope is a journey, one decision at a time, one step at a time, one small success at a time, one failure at a time, one restart at a time.
To start your personal journey towards hope, let me encourage you to start. Starting, like all good beginnings, has a jumping-off point. A point of departure.
Make a decision to start.
Look for hope in your daily life.
Live for hope in your decisions.
Search for hope in your encounters with people.
King Solomon once wrote,
In all your getting, get understanding.
I would adjust it to say,
In all your hoping, find hope.
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First in a series:
Hope: From Head to Heart
Practical steps for living with hope in a hope deprived world