Earth the Beautiful

"I felt like I was almost looking at a secret . . . that humans weren’t supposed to see this."

Spacewalking astronaut Michael Massimino has been on board Space Shuttle Atlantis during its latest space flight (a mission to the Hubble Space Telescope). Massimino had these remarks on the beauty of earth:

I felt like I was almost looking at a secret . . . that humans weren’t supposed to see this. This is not anything you’re supposed to see. It’s too beautiful. There’re no words to describe how beautiful things are out there. So I like to describe what was going through my mind at the time.

Speaking of his first-ever look to earth on a spacewalk (back in 2002), the astronaut described:

It was a day pass and I could view the Earth very clearly. It was right there. And my first reaction was to look away from it. That it was so beautiful, people weren’t supposed to see it. I actually turned my head. I thought, I’m not supposed to be looking at this. This was too much to see. It was like looking into absolute paradise.

For we masses who have not had the opportunity to view our planet from above (or below, since directions become somewhat meaningless in orbit!), Massimino’s words give us a small glimpse at the emotional power of seeing the beauty of earth amid the desolation of space. While earth certainly is not paradise (any longer), its habitability is an important evidence for the Creator’s design. Perhaps Massimino, knowingly or not, caught the tiniest fraction of a fraction of a glimpse of what God saw in Genesis 1:12 after He had created..

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