By Charlie Fuller.
It was on a cloudless night back in the 1960s. My dad took my older brother and me out to the backyard, and we craned our necks upward. The night sky was filled with stars. Bright stars. Dim stars. Clusters of stars. Individual stars. Stars everywhere. Our mission was to find a single moving speck of light in that vast field of glitter. We were looking for a satellite orbiting the earth. Somehow my dad had learned that it was passing over North Little Rock at just that moment. We looked and looked and looked, squinting our eyes across the galaxy.
And then I saw it! This tiny, singular pinpoint of light was actually moving across the sky. I found it! (And I found it BEFORE my big brother did!) I pointed excitedly to this pinhole of light making its way around the Earth, and my dad and my brother saw it too. Mission accomplished!
During the ’60s, our family, like many others, followed the many missions of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Missions with rockets, satellites, space men and, eventually, walks on the moon. The work of NASA captured the imagination of a nation and the Fuller family as well. What must life be like in outer space? On the moon? On other planets? We could only imagine.
In times long ago someone else was focused on the heavens. Sometimes called “wise men,” sometimes “magi,” they were searchers, looking towards the sky to guide them to a place they knew not, to something beyond their wildest imaginations.
They went forward not knowing how long the journey would be, not knowing where it would take them, not knowing what the struggles would be along the way, not knowing the destination and not knowing what they would find when they found it.
Do we have what it would take for such a journey?
I contend that out there beyond our horizon, accessible only to our imagination, is a pinprick of light, a light that shines just a bit brighter than the surrounding lights, a light that’s moving forward toward a world where good news shines through the darkest night. Take a moment and be still, close your eyes to the world around you, and you just might see it — moving across the sky of your life leading you toward something more powerful, something better, something totally unexpected … something that looks and feels a lot like Jesus.