By Oyewole Sarumi
In April 2026, four astronauts aboard the Artemis II mission traveled farther from Earth than any human being had ventured in over half a century. They sailed nearly 700,000 miles, looped around the far side of the Moon, and gazed upon our planet as a fragile blue jewel suspended in the vastness of space. When they returned, something remarkable happened.
These were not theologians or pastors, they were test pilots, engineers, and naval officers, trained in the hardest of sciences. Yet one by one, they struggled to find words adequate to describe what they had seen.
One of them, Victor Glover, a devout Christian who carried a Bible on the mission, stood before the cameras and confessed: “It’s too big to just be in one body”. Another, Commander Reid Wiseman, who had never considered himself a religious person, found himself weeping uncontrollably at the sight of a chaplain’s cross.
What these astronauts encountered in the silence of space was not a scientific problem requiring a solution but a mystery demanding a response. Their testimony provides a contemporary witness to an ancient truth: God is too great for our comprehension, too vast for our instruments, and too glorious for our categories. The view from above, it turns out, does not make God smaller, it makes us smaller, and in that smallness, we finally begin to see how great He truly is.
The Testimony of the Astronauts
Victor Glover: “It’s Too Big to Just Be in One Body”
Victor Glover is no ordinary man. He is a Navy test pilot, a combat veteran with twenty-four missions in Iraq, a man holding three master’s degrees, with over three thousand flight hours across more than forty aircraft types. He has faced danger, mastered complexity, and pushed the boundaries of human achievement.
On April 1, 2026, he became the first Black astronaut to fly to the Moon. He is also a devout Christian who attends the Southeast Church of Christ in Friendswood, Texas, and who once famously declared, “There are no atheists on top of rockets”.
When Glover returned from the Artemis II mission, he stood before the cameras at Ellington Field in Houston and spoke from a place of raw vulnerability. He had carried something with him throughout the ten-day mission, a gratitude so overwhelming that he feared even attempting to articulate it. “When this started on April 3rd, I wanted to thank God in public,” he said. “And I want to thank God again. Because even bigger than my challenge trying to describe what we went through, the gratitude”.
Then came the words that captured something profound: “It’s too big to just be in one body”. What was too big? The experience. The sight of Earth from afar. The overwhelming sense of having participated in something that transcended individual human capacity. Glover was not speaking of God directly, yet his words echo the Psalmist’s recognition that the Creator’s works exceed our capacity to contain them. The experience of the divine, even mediated through the grandeur of creation, is too much for any single human vessel to hold.
During the mission, on Easter Sunday while orbiting the Moon, Glover offered a message to those on Earth. He reminded them that “you’re on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos”. He continued: “Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we’re doing is special. But we’re the same distance from you. And I’m trying to tell you, just trust me: you are special”. In that moment, Glover was not diminishing the significance of his own journey; he was elevating the significance of every human soul. The view from space had taught him that Earth itself is a vessel of divine purpose, and every person aboard it is cherished by its Creator.
Reid Wiseman: When the Non-Religious Weep at a Cross
Perhaps even more striking than the testimony of the believing astronaut is the testimony of the one who did not believe. Reid Wiseman, commander of the Artemis II mission, had never considered himself a religious person. He was a man of science, of engineering, of measurable realities. But space changed something in him.
Upon returning to Earth, Wiseman sought out a chaplain. When the chaplain walked into his cabin on the retrieval ship, Wiseman looked at the cross on the chaplain’s collar and broke down in tears. A man who had traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, who had seen the entire lunar disk at once, who had witnessed a solar eclipse that lasted fifty-four minutes, a spectacle beyond anything available to human eyes from the planet’s surface, found himself undone by a simple wooden symbol.
What happened to Wiseman? He encountered something that his scientific training could not explain. The experience of space had awakened in him what one observer called a “void the size of God” that only God can fill. His tears were not merely physical relief; they were “the cry of the soul,” the moment when a creature comes face to face with the magnitude of the Creator. Wiseman had traveled more than 400,000 kilometers, pushed beyond technological limits, and yet found answers only in what transcends the material. In the face of the infinite, he recognized his own smallness and felt a need for help “from above”.
C.S. Lewis, reflecting on the search for God in space, offered a warning that Wiseman’s experience confirms: “Those who do not find God on Earth are unlikely to find Him in space. But send a saint up in a spaceship and he’ll find God in space as he found God on Earth”. Wiseman did not find God because he went to space; he found the question that space forced him to ask. And in asking, he discovered that the answer pointed beyond the stars.
Jeffrey Williams: A Creationist in Orbit
Before Artemis II, there was Jeffrey Williams, a NASA astronaut who holds the U.S. record for the most days spent in space. Williams is a creationist who wrote a book about his experience titled The Work of His Hands: A View of God’s Creation From Space. In a video call from space with The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Williams described what he saw: “When I look out the window and see this, all of the elements like you would imagine you would see with a creative work by an infinite God. You see the design, you see the beauty, you see the purpose”.
Williams spoke of stepping outside the spacecraft, enclosed in a suit that sustained his life, able to see through the full-faced visor “not only the vastness and the majesty of the globe itself but deep out into space”. This experience, he said, “deepens a comprehension, the observation of what we know through Scripture about the amazing creative work of God. It’s an incredibly humbling experience”.
Like Glover, Williams grappled with the concept of infinity. “We have a hard time comprehending the word ‘infinity,’ but certainly the expanse of creation is infinity as far as we can understand it”. Yet even as he acknowledged the incomprehensible vastness of the cosmos, he pointed to the particularity of Earth: “You look down at the planet and you see this marvelous, unique place we call Earth, uniquely designed … to sustain life”. The expansiveness is beyond our comprehension, Williams said, “but certainly the expanse of creation is extended as far as we can understand it”.
Williams also addressed a common misconception: that scientists and astronauts are naturally atheists. “There is a generalisation that anyone who worked for NASA, or an organisation like that, would naturally be an atheist, but that’s not true. There are many Christians in the organisation”. The presence of believers among the most highly trained scientists in the world testifies that faith and rigorous inquiry are not adversaries but companions in the pursuit of truth.
The Overview Effect and the Ultraview Effect
The experiences of these astronauts are not merely anecdotal; they have been studied and named. In 1987, the American writer and space philosopher Frank White coined the term “overview effect” to describe the profound shift in consciousness that astronauts experience when viewing Earth from space. This effect often produces a sense of euphoria, a mystical intuition of connectedness, and a recognition of the fragility and unity of our planet.
Edgar Mitchell, of the Apollo 14 expedition in 1971, described his own overview effect as “a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught”. He continued: “My understanding of the separate distinctness and the relative independence of movement of those cosmic bodies was shattered. There was an upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a feeling of ubiquitous harmony, a sense of interconnectedness with the celestial bodies surrounding our spacecraft. I was part of a larger natural process than I’d previously understood”.
Yet the Artemis II astronauts experienced something beyond the overview effect. They traveled farther from Earth than any humans since the Apollo era, and their testimony suggests what might be called an “ultraview effect”, an experience so overwhelming that it defies easy categorization. Victor Glover described the experience as “too big to just be in one body”. Reid Wiseman, though not religious, sought out a chaplain and wept at the sight of a cross. These are not merely aesthetic responses to beauty; they are existential encounters with transcendence.
One observer noted that under the lens of faith, the overview effect goes beyond a mere change in consciousness; it awakens the human being to their spiritual origin. Contemplating Earth suspended in the immensity of space, the astronaut experiences what the Psalmist declared: “The heavens declare the glory of God”. Spiritual understanding, this observer concluded, is not born merely of the intellect but of a sincere surrender to the presence of God, who manifests even in the most remote places of the universe.
A God Too Big for Our Instruments
The testimony of these astronauts brings us back to the central truth with which we began: science is too small to explain God, and God is too great for science to comprehend and for men’s feeble instruments. The astronauts did not find God through their instruments; they found the limits of their instruments. They discovered that no telescope can capture the majesty of the Creator, no spectrometer can analyze the divine nature, and no equation can contain the One who spoke the universe into being.
Prof. C.S. Lewis offered a memorable analogy: “Looking for God, or heaven, by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare’s plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play. But he is never present in the same way as Falstaff or Lady Macbeth”. The playwright is present in his work, but he is not contained by it. So too with God: He is present in His creation, but He is not confined to it. The heavens declare His glory, but they do not exhaust His being.
This is the great error of those who, like Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, declared that because their cosmonauts did not see God in space, God must not exist. Such a statement reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of who God is. God is not a physical being floating somewhere in the cosmos, waiting to be discovered by a passing spacecraft. He is the Creator of the cosmos, the One who upholds all things by the word of His power. To expect to find God in space as one might find a planet or a star is to mistake the Creator for a creature.
The Puritan divine Richard Baxter captured this truth when he wrote: “If you could fathom or measure him, and know his greatness by a comprehensive knowledge, he were not God. A creature can comprehend nothing but a creature. You may know God, but not comprehend him; as your foot treads on the earth, but does not cover all the earth. The sea is not the sea, if you can hold it in a spoon.” The astronauts who have seen the Earth from afar have learned something of this truth. They have seen the spoon, and they have glimpsed the vastness of the sea, and they know that the spoon cannot hold it.
The Formation of Leaders in an Age of Discovery
What does this mean for those called to lead God’s people? The testimony of the astronauts offers a powerful corrective to two errors that plague contemporary Christian leadership. The first error is the reduction of God to manageable proportions. When we fashion a God who fits within our theological systems, our cultural preferences, and our political agendas, we create an idol. The true God is always breaking out of our categories, exceeding our expectations, and confounding our calculations. The view from space reminds us that our God is too big for any human system to contain.
The second error is the abandonment of wonder. In our rush to explain, systematize, and apply, we can lose the capacity for awe. We can become so familiar with the language of faith that we forget the reality to which it points. The astronauts, seeing the Earth from a distance of a quarter-million miles, were struck by wonder. They struggled to find words. They wept. They gave thanks. This is the posture of true worship, not the confident mastery of divine truths but the humble acknowledgment that we have seen only the edges of His ways.
The Apostle Paul, that great theologian and missionary, understood this tension. After exploring the depths of God’s saving purposes, he broke into doxology: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!” (Romans 11:33). Paul did not say that God’s ways were difficult to find; he said they were beyond tracing out. He did not suggest that with more effort we might eventually comprehend; he declared that comprehension is permanently beyond us. And his response was not frustration but worship.
Leaders who embrace this posture will lead differently. They will preach with humility, acknowledging that their words can never fully capture the glory of God. They will teach with wonder, inviting others into the mystery rather than pretending to have solved it. They will counsel with compassion, pointing suffering souls to a God whose ways are beyond tracing out but whose love is deeper than any human understanding. And they will model a faith that is not threatened by scientific discovery but enriched by it, seeing in every new revelation of the cosmos a fresh invitation to worship the Creator.
The View from Above and the Call Below
As I wrap up this article, let’s note that the astronauts who ventured into space did not find a God small enough to be seen through a window or measured by an instrument. They found, instead, a God too great for their bodies to contain, too vast for their minds to comprehend, too glorious for their words to express. Victor Glover returned from the Moon with a gratitude that overflowed in public thanksgiving. Reid Wiseman returned with tears that he could not explain. Jeffrey Williams returned with a deepened conviction that the creation bears the unmistakable mark of an infinite Creator.
Their testimony joins the chorus of Scripture and the witness of the Church across the ages. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows His handiwork (Psalm 19:1). Yet even as the heavens declare, they do not contain. The God who made the heavens is greater than the heavens. The One who stretched out the cosmos is not confined by it. And the human beings who venture into that cosmos, whether in a spaceship or in the quiet of their own hearts, will always find that the more they see of God’s works, the more they realize how much they have not seen of God Himself.
For the Christian leader, this is both a humbling and a liberating truth. It is humbling because it reminds us that we are not the masters of divine truth but the servants of a mystery. It is liberating because it frees us from the pretense of having all the answers and invites us into the life of wonder, gratitude, and worship. The view from above teaches us what the view from below can never fully convey: that our God is too big for our comprehension, too great for our instruments, and too glorious for our words. And in that realization, we find our true place, not as those who have mastered God, but as those who have been mastered by Him.
As the Psalmist asked, “When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have ordained, what is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You visit him?” (Psalm 8:3-4). The answer is not a proposition to be grasped but a mystery to be worshipped. The God who is too big to be comprehended is the God who, in His infinite condescension, has made Himself known in Jesus Christ. And to know Him, even as we cannot fully comprehend Him, is the beginning of eternal life.
Prof. Sarumi, a pastor, a teacher of the Word, and disciple of Jesus, write from Lagos. Tel. 234 803 304 1421, Email: oyewolethecoach@gmail.com
