{"id":4572,"date":"2025-04-23T09:00:39","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T13:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=4572"},"modified":"2025-04-23T09:00:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T13:00:39","slug":"a-higher-plateau","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/23\/a-higher-plateau\/","title":{"rendered":"A Higher Plateau"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0<\/em>click here<\/a>

None of the seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger<\/em> survived the explosion that tore it apart just 73 seconds after launch.

But something traveling aboard the shuttle did survive.

Workers tasked with recovering fragments of the ship discovered a black duffel bag floating in the Atlantic.

Inside was a soccer ball.\u00a0It had been brought aboard by 39-year-old veteran astronaut Ellison Onizuka, the first Asian-American and first Hawaiian ever to travel in\u00a0space.\u00a0

Onizuka was an assistant coach for the girls soccer team at Houston’s Clear Lake High School, just four miles from the Johnson Space Center.\u00a0His daughter Janelle played for the Lady Falcons.\u00a0

Given the chance to carry\u00a0something personal into space, El chose to take a soccer ball that had been signed by everyone on the team.\u00a0The words “Good Luck, Shuttle Crew!” were plainly written on one of its hexagonal surfaces.\u00a0He slipped it into a duffel bag and stored it in his private locker.

On January 28, 1986, what should have been a joyful day became a nightmare.

El’s wife Lorna remembers being brought into a conference room, where she huddled with members of the other astronaut families.\u00a0NASA officials somberly announced that the crew had been lost. Lorna fainted.\u00a0As she slid down the wall, she hit the light switch.\u00a0The room went dark.\u00a0\u00a0

“At that very moment,” she said later, “all the lights went out because all the lights did go out in all of us.”

No one expected anything like a soccer ball to be recovered from the debris. The Onizukas decided to give it back to Clear Lake, where Janelle tearfully presented it in a ceremony that was supposed to be have been led by her dad.\u00a0\u00a0

For 30 years it sat in a display case in the hallway, gradually fading from the community’s collective memory.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0

But in October 2016, another astronaut whose daughter attended Clear Lake – Colonel Shane Kimbrough – was given the chance to carry something personal on his flight to the International Space Station.\u00a0He asked permission to take the soccer ball.\u00a0

As Tonya Malinowski reported in a story that first aired on ESPN, the ball spent 173 days aboard the space station. You can see it floating weightlessly in the picture above by one of the ISS windows. It orbited the Earth nearly 3,000 times, finally coming home on April 10, 2017.\u00a0\u00a0

Lorna was “happy, gratified, thankful” that the ball had completed its original mission.\u00a0Now it sits in a more prominent display case at Clear Lake, passed every day by thousands of students, including Ellison’s grandchildren.

When a story has been interrupted, we feel restless until it’s completed.\u00a0\u00a0

This is an ancient longing.\u00a0Someone dies too young.\u00a0Or too soon.\u00a0A deep\u00a0dream is deferred. This world doesn’t feel big enough, and life never seems to\u00a0last long enough.

Why does everyone feel this way?

It seems that God has placed within us a kind of homing beacon – a reminder that our stories were made to straddle two worlds.\u00a0We ache for what was never completed\u00a0in this life – an ache that can only be addressed if life doesn’t end in a cemetery.

That’s one of the primary takeaways from Easter.\u00a0

When Jesus died, the lights seemed to go out.

But then a remarkable rumor began to spread: Jesus had not been conquered by Death.\u00a0He had gone one-on-one with humanity’s greatest enemy and won<\/em>.\u00a0Followers of Jesus live in the confidence that even when something\u00a0seems incomplete, interrupted, or\u00a0tragically cut short, it will one day be made right by the God who rules both this world and the next.\u00a0

If you own a passport, you may have noticed the\u00a0quotes printed at the top\u00a0of the pages.\u00a0\u00a0

There’s an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence, along with\u00a0selected words\u00a0from John F. Kennedy, George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.

Towards the end of your passport, at the top of pages 22 and 23 in the latest publication, are these words from Ellison Onizuka: “Every generation has the obligation to free men’s minds for a look at new worlds…to look out from a higher plateau than the last generation.”\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>

By God’s grace, our minds can be freed to see farther than we’ve ever seen before.

We live in the expectation that one day\u00a0life’s mysteries will become plain.

“For now\u00a0we see only a reflection as in a mirror, then [in the next world] we shall see face to face.\u00a0Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”<\/em> (I Corinthians 13:12).
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here None of the seven astronauts aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger survived the explosion that tore it apart just 73 seconds after launch. But something traveling aboard the shuttle did survive. Workers tasked with recovering fragments of the ship discovered a black duffel bag floating in the Atlantic. Inside was a soccer… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4573,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[203,36,915],"class_list":["post-4572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-easter","tag-heaven","tag-space-shuttle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4572"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4574,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4572\/revisions\/4574"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}