Shoot the Moon!
. . . I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm. . . .
Joel 2:25 (KJV)
The moon is approximately a quarter of a million miles from the earth. For centuries we have enjoyed it, worshiped it, built calendars around its appearance, planned launchings of ships around its gravitational pull, and promised it to those we love.
A relatively new treatment of the moon has been the novelty of going to it. Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, a fantasy that showed his fascination with the idea of space travel and a visit to the orb. In the first volume of his Space Trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis wrote of the moon’s orbit as a barrier preventing cosmic demon forces from assaulting the earth. So by the 1930s the science-fiction community had an established notion of the moon’s distance from the earth.
Early science-fiction authors also had a well-developed sense of the vast distances involved between bodies in our solar system and the other stars. This gave them plenty of material to teach the impact of small changes over those distances. One of the best-loved lessons was that of accuracy in our moon shots, given unfortunately before we ever attempted one. But here is how the lesson goes.
The moon is 240,000 miles away from the earth.
Since the moon orbits the earth, the radius of that orbit is 244,000 miles because the earth’s radius is 4,000 miles.
The circumference of the moon’s orbit is pi X 244,000 x 2 = 1,533,097 miles.
Therefore, one degree is 1,533,097 / 360 = 4,258 miles.
Accordingly, the lesson we must learn is that if you aim a rocket at the moon and you are off by just one degree, you will miss the moon by more than 4,000 miles!
Of course, we added a level of sophistication to our formula. Because the moon orbits the earth once every 28 days, we need to aim our rocket to a place where the moon will be when the rocket gets there. Since NASA would put a rocket into earth orbit for a while and then send it off to the moon from there, the mathematicians calculated a 4-day trip to the moon from earth. This means the moon is about 51 degrees away from the intersection point if everything goes well. Even so, the idea remains the same. If your aim is 50 or 52 degrees away, then your rocket zips right on by the moon and into deep space. (Well, maybe it goes somewhere else, but that’s another story.)
So goes the lesson. Miss your aim by a little, and you miss your target by a lot.
All right already! Enough!
This is a variation of the old saying “as the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” It’s one more of those lessons of child-rearing, education, and character formation that needs revisiting.
Let me first dismiss the lesson of the moon shot as pure hogwash! From an engineer’s perspective, nobody would be so foolish as to design a rocket like that. Consider this. You make those careful calculations, even down to the fractional degree, and you shoot your rocket up into earth orbit. Then you do your trans-lunar insertion (that’s what I think NASA used to call it) to break free of earth’s gravity and fly to the moon. Along the way something moves in the rocket, or some microscopic piece of space dust collides with the rocket, and suddenly it’s off course. Now what?
Thank goodness, while the mathematicians calculated the flight path, the engineers designed the rocket! They designed into the rocket a few extras, one of which included the ability to make a mid-course correction. From the ground NASA could fire one of these engines for a few seconds and return the rocket to its course. And of course, once we put humans into those rockets, the crew on board could fire those engines. Close to the earth the corrections are slight. Close to the moon they become more significant. But the ability to change course is absolutely necessary, since life between here and the moon is so unpredictable.
Now let’s apply this to our life lessons and beef up our teachings.
We look to our upbringing and take an assessment of where we are in our lives. We include the genetic and environmental components of our childhood and our adolescence. We consider the mistakes we’ve made, the penalties we’ve paid, the violence we’ve suffered, and the 8-ball we’re behind. From here the path to our destination looks bleak. We are going to miss our life goals, set by others or ourselves, by far more than a few thousand miles. We have wounds and brokenness to deal with, we have scars that keep us from coping with new relationships, we have memories of the hurts we’ve caused others. We’re off the chosen path.
This is where the guidance system is to kick in. Our first action is to repudiate any teaching that says our lives are on a fixed course. Our second action is to identify the resources available to us for mid-course corrections. And our third action is to fire up those engines and make those corrections so we can get off the destructive paths we think we can’t escape.
Nobody is going to say this is easy. Nobody is going to trivialize the pain that you have gone through in your life, or the heartache that accompanies the experiences you’ve had. Every pain is real. Every hurt is to be acknowledged and honored in your life. And nobody is going to say that you will accomplish total restoration in your life, though you may be surprised at what you can accomplish.
Nobody is going to say that the mid-course correction can be done alone. You may be able to do some or all of these actions without help, but you may be the exception. And if you have resources to draw on when you make changes, you can find this far more effective than when it’s a solo act.
The only part of this that you can do yourself (in fact, the only part of this that you must do yourself) is to decide to make the mid-course correction. After you have made that decision, the resources are there for you to draw on.
Grace and Peace,
Charles+
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