Artemis II pilot Victor Glover shared a thoughtful Easter message to Earth from deep space during their journey to moon.
Do you know how precious we are in the eyes of God? Out of the entire universe, He created one perfect, beautiful garden and placed us right in the middle of it. We call it Earth. And we didn’t simply end up here by chance.
God had a plan from the very beginning, for us, for our salvation, for our eternal life. And astronaut Victor Glover, somewhere between Earth and the moon on Easter weekend, saw it with his own eyes and couldn’t keep it to himself.
CBS News anchor Mark Strassmann asked Glover if he had an Easter message to share, drawing a comparison to Apollo 8’s famous Christmas Eve reading from Genesis. Glover was straight with him. He had nothing prepared.
But then he started talking.
“You guys are talking to us because we’re in a spaceship really far from Earth,” Glover said. “But you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe.”
Created. He used that word on purpose. From where he was sitting, the universe wasn’t inspiring. It was empty. Dark. A whole lot of nothing in every direction. And right in the middle of all that nothing was one living, breathing, beautiful world.
“Just trust me,” Glover said. “You are special in all of this emptiness. This is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together.”
Have we ever needed to hear that more than right now?
And he didn’t stop there. Glover shared his Easter message that speaks to every heart, despite their cultures and beliefs.
“Whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not,” he said, “this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we’ve got to get through this together.”
His crewmate Christina Koch looked out the window too. And what hit her wasn’t the stars. It was the blackness surrounding Earth. “In the end, for me it leads back to gratitude,” she told CBS News. “Gratitude that out of this huge universe, we get to live together on planet Earth. What an anomaly it is.”
After Glover finished speaking, he, commander Reid Wiseman, Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reached over and clasped hands together. Four people, hurtling toward the moon, holding on to each other.
The crew was set to loop around the dark side of the moon Monday evening before beginning the long journey back home.
But that image stays with us. Four people. Hands clasped. Easter weekend. The moon ahead and Earth behind.
We don’t have to leave the atmosphere to feel what they felt. God placed us here, in this specific time, on this specific planet, and that was never an accident. Easter says exactly that. The cross wasn’t a reaction. It was a plan. And the empty tomb is proof that we are worth something to the God who made all of it.
So today, let’s stop rushing past the weight of that. Look up. Look around. Grab someone’s hand. And thank God out loud that out of all this emptiness, He put us exactly here.
WATCH: Astronaut Victor Glover’s Thoughtful Easter Message from Space
