When You Go Far Enough, You Run Into God
Reid Wiseman didn’t go to space to find faith.
By his own admission, he’s not what you’d call a religious person. He’s a Navy commander, a mission leader, a man equipped to handle pressure, analyze data, and stay calm in situations that would leave most of us crying into our seat cushions.
But when the Artemis II capsule splashed down and he was hoisted back onto the ship — back to earth, back to gravity, back to the noise of everyday life — something happened that no training manual could have prepared him for.
He asked for the chaplain.
“When I got back on the ship — I’m not really a religious person — but there was just no other avenue for me to explain anything or to experience anything,” Wiseman said.
When the chaplain walked in — a man Wiseman had never met before — he noticed the cross on the officer’s collar.
And he broke down in tears.
Moments That Exceed Our Vocabulary
We’ve all had them. Maybe not 240,000 miles from earth, but moments nonetheless.
Moments so big, so overwhelming, so far outside the boundaries of normal human experience that our usual ways of coping and explaining just… collapse.
The birth of a child. The loss of someone irreplaceable. A diagnosis that changes everything. A miracle you watched unfold right in front of you.
In those moments, the part of us that loves to analyze, plan, and stay composed suddenly goes quiet.
And something deeper — something that doesn’t care about logic or data — reaches for something bigger.
Wiseman didn’t have words for what he had witnessed. His frameworks for understanding the world fell apart somewhere between the stars and the splashdown.
So he reached for the one thing that has been reaching for us since the dawn of time.
There was just no other avenue.
The Cross Was Already There
Here’s the part of this story that stops me in my tracks every time.
Wiseman didn’t find faith in space. He didn’t have a dramatic conversion while floating past the moon.
He came back to earth — and the cross was waiting for him. Quietly. Patiently. On a collar in a room on a Navy ship.
Not performing. Not demanding anything. Just present.
And isn’t that exactly how God tends to show up?
Not always in the earthquake. Not always in the fire.
Sometimes in a symbol on a stranger’s uniform at the exact moment you’ve run out of other explanations.
The still small voice — wearing a badge.
Meanwhile, On The Same Mission
Wiseman wasn’t the only Artemis II astronaut to encounter faith during the mission. His crewmate, pilot Victor Glover, took a different path to the same destination.
Glover didn’t wait until splashdown to talk about his faith. He carried it with him the entire mission — openly, consistently, unapologetically.
He delivered an Easter message from space. And then, just before the crew lost communication on the far side of the moon, he shared this:
“Christ said in response to what was the greatest command — that it was to love God with all that you are. He said the second — that is to love your neighbor as yourself.”
The greatest commandment. Spoken from the farthest point any human beings have traveled from earth in over fifty years.
Two men. Two different relationships with faith. The same mission.
And somehow — the cross found them both.
The Challenge Wiseman Left Behind
Before his interview ended, Wiseman said something that deserves to echo far beyond the space community:
“We’re starting to lose scope as a society that you do have to go do things. You have to go do really hard, really challenging things. We have got to get our hands and our minds engaged.”
He’s right.
And for those of us who follow Christ, we know that faith was never meant to be passive. It’s not just something you sit with. It’s something you do.
Faith was designed to move. To act. To go.
To fly 240,000 miles if that’s what it takes.
And to come back changed.
Psalm 19:1
“The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of His hands.”
They always have.
Sometimes it just takes going up there to finally hear it.