High Calling

Tis spring break, and for the first time in a very very long time I have some free time to rub together. I've got time to read again, and time to write somethin...which I haven't gotten to do for months. On the flight home from Florida I began reading a book I got for Christmas, High Calling, The Courageous Life and Faith of Space Shuttle Columbia Commander Rick Husband, written by his widow, Evelyn Husband. I'm halfway through, and I gotta say it's faaantastic. For those not in the know, Rick Husband was the commander of STS-107, the fateful space shuttle mission ended in flames and debris as the orbiter Columbia broke apart and burned up over Texas skies on the morning of February 1st, 2003 during re-entry.

Perhaps you don't, but I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing, and how I found out of the tragedy, and it effected me deeply. I'm a certified space nerd with aspirations of one day being an astronaut myself. For those of you who are not quite so interested in the manned space program as I am, I'll give you a little refresher on what went down that terrible winter day. During launch in late January, the extreme forces involved ripped off a small piece of TPS (thermal protection system) foam from the external fuel tank. This was a regular occurrence and even occasionally ripped off tiles from the shuttle, but it had been happening for over one hundred launches without any problem. This time however, the chunk of foam smashed a large hole in the leading edge of the left wing. During re-entry, the hot ionized plasma that surrounds the speeding orbiter flowed into the wing, vaporizing the superstructure and breaking the wing off. Columbia was reduced to a fireball breaking into pieces within the blink of an eye just minutes before it's scheduled touch-down at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Anywho, so why am I talking about all this space mumbo jumbo? Well, the book is the biography of the commander of that incredibly successful mission that ended in such tragedy. But more than facts of his life, the biography is about the spiritual walk of Rick Husband. It is a wonderful book. I've been reading it for two and a half days and I'm half way through it...which for me, a slow reader, is pretty good, and shows how good a book it really is....I can't put it down.

I'm rambling, and I'm not really coming across as eloquently as I would like, so I'll get right down to it...read this book. If you are a Christian, read this book. If you love space flight, read this book. If you are a Christian who loves space flight, then you absolutely must read this book. If you are struggling in your faith, read the book. If you're struggling with love, read this book. It's amazing. One of the things that's so appealing to me is that Rick Husband was not a perfect Christian. I read the biography of Rich Mullins a few years back, and it was inspiring, but Rich Mullins was always a fantastically strong Christian, which for those of us who struggle and stumble, that's actually pretty discouraging. Rick Husband came through struggles and a weak relationship with God and through the prayer and help of friends and a great deal of study of the Word, he began to walk closer and closer until he started to really have a fantastic relationship with Christ. It's really inspiring and quite frankly, helpful. It's encouraging. It gives me hope in a good many areas. Again, I digress. The point of all this is to say that YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK!! Every now and then, when I read something especially cool, especially meaningful, or something that strikes me, I'll write it in. I'll start it off here with something on page 97, a transcript of an interview he gave shortly after his first flight to space in 1998 on STS-96.

Many people, reporters especially, have questioned Rick concerning the argument of science versus religion. When he came back from the Discovery [STS-96] mission, he was more than ready to answer their questions. In a taped interview Rick said,

"Even if you look at the universe and all the stars, our solar system--all the order that there is there, and the fact that the planets orbit around the sun, and the way that the different galaxies behave, all the different interactions that are there....I don't believe that's something that just happened by chance.

"Nobody can explain where everything came from and how it all got here. You just take a look around and you see the complexity in so many things and the detail in so many small things; how the simplest cell works, up to a tree, the human being; just the miracle of seeing our children born; and you say, 'This just didn't happen by chance.' If you even take a look at a system like the space shuttle--that is the most complicated and complex flying machine in the world and it didn't happen by chance and it doesn't approach the complexity of a human being. It took a lot of people a lot of time to sit down and think and put together that space shuttle and the entire system. Then to sit and think that the entire universe could have happened just by accident, it doesn't make sense to me.

"It'd almost seem you have to have more faith to accept that it happened by chance than to accept that God created the universe."

[page 97-98 of High Calling by Evelyn Husband, published by Thomas Nelson, Inc, 2003]

This is for you naysayers out there, those who say that only fools and the simple believe that God created the universe, that no thinking man can honestly believe in anything other than the Big Bang, that no person with an IQ greater than that of a pea could think that our world came about by anything but chance...well, Rick Husband did, and he was an astronaut. Perhaps it sounds trite, but he is among the best of the best that our great nation, the best of the best, has to offer. To become the commander of a space shuttle, Rick Husband must be among the very best humanity can offer. And if Rick Husband's strong faith in the Lord makes you think anything less of him and his memory, than you are the fool, and I pity you, and I pray that God have mercy on you.

Anywho, I say read the book, it's fantastic, but I'll put the cool stuff I see in every now and then.

~AndyJams~