The Astronaut Who Knelt on the Moon

In July 1971, Colonel James Irwin stood on the lunar surface during the Apollo 15 mission. He looked up from the grey dust — not at sky, because there was none — and saw Earth, a blue marble hanging in absolute blackness. No wind. No birdsong. No human voice for 240,000 miles in any direction.

And in that silence, Irwin felt the presence of God more powerfully than he ever had on Earth. "I felt the power of God as I'd never felt it before," he later wrote. Standing where no atmosphere softened the stars, where the Milky Way blazed with a ferocity invisible from any hillside, Irwin was overwhelmed not by his own achievement but by his smallness.

That is the paradox David captures in Psalm 8. The shepherd-king gazes at the night sky — just the sliver visible from a Judean pasture — and asks the question every honest soul must eventually ask: "What is mankind that You are mindful of them?" The heavens declare the craftsmanship of the Almighty, and yet this same God stoops to crown fragile human beings with glory and honor, setting all things under their feet.

Irwin came home and spent his remaining years as an evangelist. He had walked where no shepherd ever could, yet he reached the same conclusion David did three thousand years earlier: the God who flung the stars into space still knows us each by name.