How Astronaut Jeffrey Williams Witnessed God’s ‘Glory on Display’ During Spacewalks
By Movieguide® Contributor
Astronaut Jeffrey Williams revealed to Kirk Cameron how his experience of Earth from space points to a creator and strengthened his faith.
“Incredible. [T]here’s an incredible pattern of color and beauty…and it invokes wonder, and of course, we know when we think of wonder it demands the Creator as its explanation,” Williams told Cameron when asked about seeing the Grand Canyon and coral reefs from space.
Williams completed five spacewalks and four missions. During his first mission in 2000, he helped deliver supplies to and did some construction on the International Space Station. His last mission was in 2016.
During his 534 total days in space, a world record for an American man, his relationship with God “deepened,” and he wants to use his time in space to strengthen others’ relationship with God as well.
“I spent a lot of time trying to study it…using the experience to illuminate, to illustrate, what the Word says about his works of creation, provisioning his creation in unique ways. And then us bearing the image of God. What are the implications of all that from that experience?” Williams said.
He shares some of that awe and wonder of God’s creation through photography.
“I knew going in that things happen so fast up there, and you’re so saturated with just the sensations and the visual and other ways that you can’t capture the memories well on your own. But through a photograph, a photograph is permanent, and it captures a memory, so I was motivated to capture as much as I could from that vantage point,” he told Cameron.
Williams said he captured about half a million photos, many of which he shared in his book “The Work of His Hands: A View of God’s Creation from Space.”
The Wisconsin native is often asked if he felt any conflict working in a science field while being a person of faith.
He responds by saying that many of the great scientists of the past, such as Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle, were also theologians.
“They were all convicted by the Scripture and driven by the Scripture in their calling as scientists. It’s really a major component of subduing the earth,” Williams said. “And they recognized and assumed a rationality in God’s created order that there was an ordering of things, and the illustrations of that are obvious.”
Williams is not the only astronaut who has shared their Christian faith. John Glenn, one of the first astronauts chosen by NASA, once said while aboard the shuttle Discovery, “To look out at this kind of creation out here and not believe in God is, to me, impossible.”
Jim Irwin, a pilot on the Apollo 15 mission, said he felt “an overwhelming sense of the presence of God” during his time on the moon.
Buzz Aldrin took communion, the first food and drink consumed on the moon, when he and Neil Armstrong made their lunar landing during the historic Apollo 11 mission.
On his return to Earth, he read aloud from Psalm 8:3-4: ”When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him? And the Son of Man, that thou visitest Him?”
Movieguide® previously reported on Aldrin:
The first communion on the moon begins 50 years ago when Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins Neil Armstrong explored the great frontier and worshipped God in the great unknown. Buzz confidentially told his story of the Communion on the moon at the 2008 16th Annual MOVIEGUIDE® Faith & Values Awards Gala in Hollywood, but now the story has received notoriety in many articles.
Aldrin was an ordained Presbyterian minister who received backlash after quoting the Psalms in flight. Reportedly he carried an index card with John 15:5 on it. Aldrin concluded the mission by reciting Psalms 8.
As the three men began their descent they all par-took in communion, praising God for His provision.
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