As a native Floridian I've always had a thing for astronauts. I was a proud third-grader at Neil A. Armstrong Elementary School in Port Charlotte. The NASA complex in Cocoa Beach, Fla., was never more than a few hours drive from anywhere I've lived in the Sunshine State, so I've seen my share of launches (including the ill-fated 1986 Challenger launch from my back yard in Tampa). The first shuttle mission landed home safely on my birthday in 1980. If I were ever on Jeopardy, I would own the board in any category related to which man piloted which spacecraft on which mission. It just comes with the territory.Jim Lovell was one of my favorites. He was the commander of the Apollo 13 mission that went so completely wrong in so many ways that they made a movie about it. I'll spare you all the particulars, but near the end of the crew's attempted return to Earth, the guys in Mission Control were trying to figure out how to orient the crippled vehicle correctly so it wouldn't skip off the atmosphere and go shooting out into nothingness. Lovell explained that all they needed was one fixed point in space. Using the Earth as his navigational anchor, he kept it in the cross-hairs of the spacecraft's observation window while he performed a controlled burn. It worked. They made it back. There was no sequel.
Maybe it was serendipity that Lovell was the guy in charge that trip. You see, some years earlier he was on a night patrol over the Sea of Japan headed back to rendezvous with the aircraft carrier Shangri-La. Much like his Apollo 13 mission, everything went wrong. The weather was awful. The homing frequency that was supposed to lead him back to the carrier was inexplicably being used by someone in Japan, leading him in the wrong direction. Worse yet, a homemade, lighted knee-board Lovell had constructed for use in his darkened cockpit shorted out all the instruments in his display, leaving him flying blind, in every sense of the word.
It wasn't until Lovell had lost all his controls that he was able to see a faint phosphorescent trail in the water that his carrier left in its wake as it churned up algae in its screws. He followed it right to his intended destination.
Control is such a hard thing for me to relinquish, especially at this time in my life when I feel like I'm just floating aimlessly, flying in circles. I like to know where I am oriented in "space," and, certainly, where I'm headed. But, as He has so many times before, the Lord has cut off all my navigational tools, every crutch of security and self-sufficiency, leaving just a singular beacon for me to follow ...
Proverbs 3:5,6
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths."
2 comments:
The perpetual calendar on Sally's desk at work said it best the other day:
"It's those times when God is all you have that you realize that God is all that you need." (Gloria Gaither)
So true!
I just keep trusting, which doesn't come easy for me.
Larry King had on the Chapman family tonight, and Steven was talking about how they needed to see something to know that Maria was alright. He said that sometime on the day she died, Maria had colored the word "see" (something she'd never done before) on a piece of paper that they found after the accident, and that gave them great peace. It did for me too.
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