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Good Morning

On the 20th of February, 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth.   In 4 hours and 56 minutes, he circled the globe three times. Through the window of the Friendship 7 capsule, hurtling through space at more than 17,000 miles per hour, he watched three sunsets and three sunrises.  He’d flown many missions as a fighter pilot in World War Two and Korea, but it was these hours and minutes in space that made him an American hero.

There’s a particular detail about his flight that I like.  In the Australian town of Perth, thousands of people switched on the lights in their houses, or ran out into the street waving torches, so that John Glenn would see the city from orbit, on the dark side of the earth.  The city authorities left the street lights on, and a local oil refinery turned its gas flare way up until the flame was nearly sixty feet high.  And alone, miles above the earth, John Glenn saw the light.

It’s a good story.  Especially since, 36 years later, Glenn went back into orbit, this time in the Space Shuttle, and the lights of Perth were switched on again.  I read somewhere that the original idea behind the ‘City of Light’ was so that Glenn would not feel so far from home, when he saw the lights in the darkness.   All that science and technology, the millions of dollars, the politics of the space race, the bravery of a man launched into the unknown – and ordinary people in their homes look up to the heavens and think, ‘He must be lonely up there.’ 

And so they turn on the light.

God of the morning light, who turns night into day, thank you.   Amen