HOPE + TRUST = FAITH

YOU JUST NEVER KNOW...
When someone might care

Travis Tritt pretty much gets it right when he sings convincingly: "Here's a quarter, call someone who cares..."

I've been thinking a lot about the expression "who cares?" in recent days. Why do I write some of things that appear on this blog and elsewhere? Why do I assume so much? Who cares?

Why do I get so exercised at times -- angry, discouraged, inspired, excited, intense, emotional, sympathetic, nostalgic? Why do I expose myself and my vulnerabilities, often as a means to an end? Why do I search for rationale and reasoning?

I mean, really...Who cares? Why bother? After all, who am I?

I came across a poem not long ago written by a 12-year-old boy by the name of Rae. My first impulse was to think, this kid was me 70 years ago, in fact he is pretty much me as I am today. Then I got to his last two lines and I realized that he had snuck one in on me. To be sure, a lesson that I was not expecting. See what you think.

YOU JUST DON'T KNOW...
Get up, get dressed
Wash your face
Think you're a disgrace
Go to school, bite your lip
Say to yourself, "I'm OK",
But you know you feel the same
Low down. Hurt. Confused.

Waiting for answers, day after day,
Not knowing what I'll say.
Am I going home or am I staying?
What are they saying?
Time's ticking, you just don't know.

Months pass, things are said
Tears are shed
But you don't give up
There still might be luck.
-- Rae, 12

Out of the mouth of a babe! "You don't give up." You keep coming back because of a natural, in-bred trust in hope. There is always the possibility of good fortune, or a blessing of some sort, just around the next corner.

Tomorrow there just might be someone who cares. Someone who can relate. Someone who accepts you. And you know what? More often than not, someone does. That's why I do what I do...And why I keep on doing it!

Thanks for reminding me of that, Rae.

SUNDAY STORIES FOR SUNDAY SCHOOL

SUNDAY STORIES FOR SUNDAY SCHOOL

Jesus went about doing good,

or did he do good "in a boat"?

I included the above scan of two antique Sunday School cards in my Perry Family web site a number of years ago.

At the time I used the cards as the subject of a Children's Story presentation during a church service that I was conducting. Truth be known, I have always had reservations about Children's Story time as part of an adult worship service....Nine times out of 10 the minister's best efforts go right over the children's heads, so why bore the kids any more than necessary and let them escape to their Sunday School classes where teachers have lessons and exercises prepared for them.

Anyway, I thought the first two verses of the "Mother Telling Sunday Stories" card on the right might just grab the children's attention on this particular Sunday because it speaks of a time that was so different from today.

God made the day of rest
The holy Sabbath day,
For us to think and talk of Him,
And not for work or play.

I'll put away my toys
Safely the night before,
And Sundays I'll be very still,
Till Monday comes once more...
I drew a parallel for the kids, explaining that "the Sabbath" as a day of rest was no doubt the way it was for their grandparents when they grew up but that things have changed today. Rules about our activities on Sundays have been relaxed considerably, perhaps to a point where there are no rules. I stressed, however, that one thing that has not changed is that "we come to Sunday School to learn about the Bible and how we might copy the good things that Jesus did for the world."

I left my spell-bound (?) young listeners with a little story about my four-year-old cousin Curtis and his first exposure to Sunday School. Naturally, it was a completely new world for Curtis and he tried very hard to listen to everything the teacher said.

When Sunday School was over his anxious mother Norma was waiting outside for him. "What did you learn in Sunday School? she asked. "Oh, about Jesus in a boat," was young Curt's surprise answer.

"Jesus in a boat? Are you sure? his mother questioned further. "Yeah," he said, handing his Sunday School card of the day over to his mom. "See, Jesus in a boat doing good."

Curtis couldn't read of course and it sure sounded to him like the teacher said "Jesus in a boat..." His mother waited until they got home to explain that the teacher had actually said: "Jesus went about doing good," just as it said on the card and in the Bible..

I reasoned to the sober, wide-eyed faces starring up at me that it really did not matter if Jesus "went about" or if he was "in a boat". The message was the thing..."doing good!" After all, Jesus walked on water and he instructed the fishermen to re-cast their nets, so why wouldn't he minister from a boat?

In retrospect, I kind of like Curtis' interpretation better.

My concluding prayer with the children went something like this:

"Thank you Lord for loving us and giving us Jesus.
Thank you also for giving us Sunday School.
Bless our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles
who look after us and make us feel safe.
We pray in the name of Jesus who 'went in a boat doing good'. Amen."

TEEN DANCER'S DREAM-INSPIRED REGALIA FILLED WITH SYMBOLIC MEANING

Eighteen-year-old First Nations dancer Maegan Mandawoub. 

The colours of Maegan Mandawoub’s regalia worn at Saugeen First Nation’s 48th annual powwow recently came to her in a dream. In her dream, she was helping her aunt get to a powwow, and they had to cross a creek. She turned to look down at the creek and saw a frozen lake. That ice is represented by her white regalia top. And there was a sunrise with purples and blues, oranges, reds and yellows, all of which are included in the 18-year-old’s traditional dress. She wore it as a proud member of Saugeen First Nation where she spent many of her youngest years. The two-day powwow was a spectacle of colourful regalia and native dancing and drumming, Indigenous food and crafts. The best of the best dancers turn out for prizes in several competitive categories every year.

Maegan Mandawoub is a high school student who now lives in Kitchener. She was this year’s head youth female dancer at the powwow.

As she explains it, two weeks after her dream, which was more than two years ago now, she learned her sick aunt wasn’t going to live long.

“I took that as a sign because, at that time, I was making my regalia, but I was just really undecided about how to make it and what colours to use. And then I had that dream.”

Her regalia is symbolic in other respects – her flowing fringes represent water, and women in her culture are water carriers. Orange bear paws declare she’s a proud member of the bear clan.

A butterfly on the back of her V-shaped yoke has a story itself to do with her unexplainable sight of white butterflies in winter. Her beaded headpiece and earrings made by an aunt look like what Maegan had in mind before telling her story.

She carries her mother’s feathered fan, which she said was a gift from inmates when her mom was a teen. (Her mother visited jails and sang for the prisoners).

The larger than life teen said she looks for signs and symbols as guideposts in her life. Some things others consider coincidences, she believes have significance.

“A lot of people in our community are also like that. We’ve seen too many things to know it’s not a coincidence.”

She respects and embraces the unseen and unknown as an article of faith.

She smudges her regalia – bathing it in the smoke of burning sweet grass to purge any negativity she may harbour, and then dances “for the people that need it.” She smudges her regalia at day’s end to “send those prayers back to the Creator.”

Interestingly, Maegan organized the first powwow in the Waterloo Region District school board two years ago at the Kitchener Memorial Auditorium and she’s also a capable speaker with an expressed concern for the world around her.

She referred to the anti-Hispanic sentiment many believe is being stoked by U.S. President Donald Trump’s own inflammatory words. She pointed to what authorities have called white supremacist mass shootings, such as the one several weeks ago in El Paso, Texas, where 22 people were killed in a Walmart shopping centre.

Hispanic and Indigenous people who live in the southern United States are actually native to those areas, different than people and tribes farther south in Mexico, she said.

And she sees similar hardness in Ontario, calling out by name Ontario Premier Doug Ford and cuts to post-secondary education funding.

“He’s doing some very bad damage to our First Nations communities. All the funding cuts for our personal funds as well, like education and stuff. Like I’m scared to go to school because I’m scared I can’t afford it.”

So she “grasps” onto her Indigenous culture because it comforts her in these “intense” times.

“And I find dancing comfortable," she adds. "I find being at powwows comfortable. And just seeing all the things that are happening to young people today -- kids in camps, and the children who have been orphaned, you know I feel for them.

“So when I dance today, when I carry my tobacco, that’s what I’m putting my tobacco in for. Because those kids, they need all the prayers that they can get at this moment.”

Amen, Maegan!  Those kids need role models like you too!!!

*Note: Tobacco was considered a gift from the Creator in many Native North American cultures; according to some of them, tobacco smoke is a means of carrying the smoker's prayers to God.

JIMMY GARDINER, A CANADIAN STATESMAN AND "WRITER"

Saskatchewan Premier Jimmy Gardiner, a headline maker and farmers' friend

I venture to say that very few of my readers know of, or remember, Canadian politician James (Jimmy) G. Gardiner

Gardiner had an exceptionally long career in public life. In fact, he had two careers of almost equal length, from 1914 to 1935 in provincial politics, and from 1935 to 1958 in federal. In Saskatchewan he sat as a back-bencher, cabinet minister, premier, and leader of the opposition. In Ottawa he served as minister of Agriculture, minister of National War Service, and a leading member of the opposition. 

What has impressed me most about the Ontario born (Hibbert Twp., Huron County, 1883) Gardiner, however, was the fact that he was a prolific writer. He wrote long detailed letters to both supporters and critics, explaining his policies with painstaking care. He put down his own longhand and texts of countless cabinet memoranda and speeches, and unlike most of his cabinet colleagues, rarely gave speeches drafted by others.

When Gardiner visited the United Kingdom during the Battle of Britain, he reported his impressions in a long vivid memoir. He also collected the details of his son Edwin's death at Dieppe and produced a private chronicle that is both touching and admirable. He wrote three books that have been a well-kept secret publicly.

Ontario Historical Plaque honors the life of James G. Gardiner.

One of the books, None of it Came Easy, was published in 1955 as the work of Nathaniel Benson, who did in fact prepare the final manuscript for publication after it became apparent that B.T. Richardson, the initial choice of author, would be unable to complete the work because of other commitments. The first draft of lengthy sections of that book, used as basic material by Benson, exist in Gardiner's own handwriting in his personal papers in the Saskatchewan archives.

Most fascinating for me, however, is book Number One. Before their careers have actually begun, unlike Gardiner, few politicians have ever set down so clearly their ideals and aspirations, enshrined in an autobiographical novel. 

The Politician: or, The Treason of Democracy, was written while 27-year-old Gardiner was an undergraduate student at Manitoba Teacher's College in 1910, four years before he contested the first of his 15 successful elections. It was edited by Norman Ward and eventually published posthumously in 1975 (13 years after his death). Many years earlier the book had been rejected as a novel by a publisher who did not understand its historical significance

While autobiographical, the work is typical of its time in emphasis on morality, on how virtue is rewarded and evil overthrown. But more importantly, it is Gardiner's own assessment of himself on the threshold of his long, record-setting career in politics. It is a unique document, extraordinarily revealing of a sensitive young man's view of himself and his world at a critical time in Canadian history.

As a key figure in the Liberal party at both levels of government, Gardiner's influence permeated the country's politics for nearly half a century. He was present at the founding of the Province of Saskatchewan in 1905, and participated in the exuberant period of western settlement before the First World War. His public policies helped to ease the ravages of regional drought and depression some 20 year later.

He held public office during two world wars, both of which witnessed strong campaigns for conscription which he passionately opposed. The nativist revolt in Saskatchewan in the 1920s led by the Ku Klux Klan, which he likewise condemned, contributed to his only election defeat.

Gardiner was a principled politician and that understandably, won him friends and enemies. First and foremost he was a party man, who believed that only through unremitting attention to the details of organization and administration could responsible government be assured

Throughout his lifetime he was a strong church and family man. He pioneered in the movement which culminated in the formation of the United Church of Canada in 1925; his home church at Lemberg, Sask., where he taught Sunday School for many years, was a union church by 1919. He married his cousin Etta in 1912, but she passed away five years later. He then married Violet McEwan, who had come to Lemberg to teach school and to play the church organ (the union resulting in four children). Son Wilfred would go on to become a Saskatchewan cabinet member.

On his deathbed, Gardiner was interviewed for several hours by Una MacLean, then of the Glenbow Foundation, Calgary. In those final days (he lapsed into a coma before interviews were completed) he was still talking enthusiastically about seeking another nomination.

Jimmy Gardiner died nine years before I came to Saskatchewan as Managing Editor of the Prince Albert Daily Herald. I regret never having met him, but his name was still household in those days, just not with my Nineth Street next door neighbor -- a man by the name of John George Diefenbaker.

The Gardiner Dam, Saskatchewan’s largest piece of infrastructure, celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017. Located 25 kilometres north of Elbow, the dam was built between 1958 and 1967. Sixty-four metres tall and 5,000 metres long, the dam was officially opened in July of 1967 as part of Canada’s centennial celebrations, along with the Qu’Appelle River Dam.

Together, the dams created Lake Diefenbaker, a 225-kilometre long reservoir. The lake serves a multitude of purposes, including power generation, irrigation, recreation, wildlife habitat, and flood control. Because the dam supports renewable energy, the province also touts it as a means of helping to reduce SaskPower’s greenhouse gas emissions. Some 60 per cent of the population depends on the South Saskatchewan River and Lake Diefenbaker for water.

Its namesake, former premier James Gardiner fought a long time for construction of a dam on the South Saskatchewan River. But it wasn’t until after his political defeat in the 1958 general election that the project broke ground. A cost-sharing agreement was signed by then-prime minister John Diefenbaker, Gardiner’s arch-opponent, and the then-new premier Tommy Douglas in 1958. The dam opened in 1967. Fifty years later, the Gardiner Dam remains one of the largest earth-filled dams in the world. If built today, it would cost more than $1 billion. 

DUTCH RESISTANCE HEROINE TRIO DID WHAT THEY HAD TO DO

Hannie Schaft (left) and Truus Oversteegen dressed in disguise.

Obituaries published in major newspapers naturally receive more attention than any other form of public notice, and almost a year ago one such obituary in The Washington Post exploded, drawing almost 700 comments and a firestorm on social media: "Freddie Oversteegen, Dutch Resistance fighter who killed Nazis through seduction, dies at 92." 

There’s an incredibly controversial story here of three teenage Dutch Resistance fighters who did what they did “because it had to be done.” Remarkably, Dutch lecturer and author, Sophie Poldermans personally knew sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen for more than 20 years and worked with them as a board member of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation. Poldermans tells their harrowing story and that of Hannie Schaft’s in her new book, Seducing and Killing Nazis - Hannie, Truus, and Freddie: Dutch Resistance Heroines of WWII [SWW Press, August 2019].

Poldermans explains, “They were young girls who faced the question: ‘Do we adapt or resist?’ They believed it was necessary to take up arms against the enemy because this was the only way to honor a livable world and fight injustice, while trying to remain human at all times. The girls decided to resist. They learned to shoot, to seduce and liquidate targeted Nazis and their collaborators, to attack and bomb railways and other strategic places, to gather information, to help Jews and children find safe places to hide, and to steal identification papers for them.”

It is a fascinating story that has prompted me to dig a little further for the information that follows.

She was 14 when she joined the Dutch resistance, though with her long, dark hair in braids she looked at least two years younger.

When she rode her bicycle down the streets of Haarlem in North Holland, firearms hidden in a basket, Nazi officials rarely stopped to question her. When she walked through the woods, serving as a lookout or seductively leading her SS target to a secluded place, there was little indication that she carried a handgun and was preparing an execution.

The Dutch resistance was widely believed to be a man’s effort in a man’s war. If women were involved, the thinking went, they were likely doing little more than handing out anti-German pamphlets or newspapers.

Yet Freddie Oversteegen and her sister Truus, two years her senior, were rare exceptions — a pair of teenage women who took up arms against Nazi occupiers and Dutch “traitors” on the outskirts of Amsterdam. With Hannie Schaft, a onetime law student with fiery red hair, they sabotaged bridges and rail lines with dynamite, shot Nazis while riding their bikes, and donned disguises to smuggle Jewish children across the country and sometimes out of concentration camps.

In perhaps their most daring act, they seduced their targets in taverns or bars, asked if they wanted to “go for a stroll” in the forest — and “liquidated” them, as Ms. Oversteegen put it, with a pull of the trigger.

“We had to do it,” she told one interviewer. “It was a necessary evil, killing those who betrayed the good people.” When asked how many people she had killed or helped kill, she demurred: “One should not ask a soldier any of that.”

Freddie (left) and sister Truus in later life.

Freddie Oversteegen, the last remaining member of the Netherlands’ most famous female resistance cell, died Sept. 5, one day before her 93rd birthday. She was living in a nursing home in Driehuis, five miles from Haarlem, and had suffered several heart attacks in recent years, said Jeroen Pliester, chairman of the National Hannie Schaft Foundation.

The organization was founded by Ms. Oversteegen’s sister in 1996 to promote the legacy of Schaft, who was captured and executed by the Nazis weeks before the end of World War II. “Schaft became the national icon of female resistance,” Pliester said, a martyr whose story was taught to schoolchildren across the Netherlands and memorialized in a 1981 movie, “The Girl With the Red Hair,” which took its title from her nickname.

Ms. Oversteegen served as a board member in her sister’s organization. But she “decided to be a little bit out of the limelight,” Pliester said, and was sometimes overshadowed by Schaft and Truus, the group’s leader.

“I have always been a little jealous of her because she got so much attention after the war,” Ms. Oversteegen told Vice Netherlands in 2016, referring to her sister. “But then I’d just think, ‘I was in the resistance as well.’ ”

It was, she said, a source of pride and of pain — a five-year experience that she never regretted, but that came to haunt her in peacetime. Late at night, unable to fall asleep, she sometimes recalled the words of an old battle song that served as an anthem for her and her sister: “We have carried the best to their graves/ torn and fired at, beaten till the blood ran/ surrounded by the executioners on the scaffold and jail/ but the raging of the enemy doesn’t frighten us.”

Freddie Nanda Oversteegen was born in the village of Schoten, now part of Haarlem, on Sept. 6, 1925. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and Freddie and Truus were raised primarily by their mother, a communist who instilled a sense of social responsibility in the young girls; she eventually remarried and had a son.

In interviews with anthropologist Ellis Jonker, collected in the 2014 book “Under Fire: Women and World War II,” Freddie Oversteegen recalled that their mother encouraged them to make dolls for children suffering in the Spanish Civil War, and beginning in the early 1930s volunteered with International Red Aid, a kind of communist Red Cross for political prisoners around the world.

Although living in poverty, sleeping on makeshift mattresses stuffed with straw, the family harbored refugees from Germany and Amsterdam, including a Jewish couple and a mother and son who lived in their attic. After German forces invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, the couples were moved to another location; Jewish community leaders feared a potential raid, because of the family’s well-known political leanings.

“They were all deported and murdered,” Ms. Oversteegen told Jonker. “We never heard from them again. It still moves me dreadfully, whenever I talk about it.”

Ms. Oversteegen and her sister began their resistance careers by distributing pamphlets (“The Netherlands have to be free!”) and hanging anti-Nazi posters (“For every Dutch man working in Germany, a German man will go to the front!”). Their efforts apparently attracted the attention of Frans van der Wiel, commander of the underground Haarlem Council of Resistance, who invited them to join his team — with their mother’s permission.

“Only later did he tell us what we’d actually have to do: sabotage bridges and railway lines,” Truus Oversteegen said, according to Jonker. “We told him we’d like to do that. ‘And learn to shoot, to shoot Nazis,’ he added. I remember my sister saying, ‘Well, that’s something I’ve never done before!’ ”
By Truus’s account, it was Freddie Oversteegen who became the first to shoot and kill someone. “It was tragic and very difficult and we cried about it afterwards,” Truus said. “We did not feel it suited us — it never suits anybody, unless they are real criminals. . . . One loses everything. It poisons the beautiful things in life.”

The Oversteegen sisters were officially part of a seven-person resistance cell, which grew to include an eighth member, Schaft, after she joined in 1943. But the three girls worked primarily as a stand-alone unit, Pliester said, acting on instructions from the Council of Resistance.

After the war ended in 1945, Truus worked as an artist, making paintings and sculptures inspired by her years with the resistance, and wrote a popular memoir, “Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever.” She died in 2016, two years after Prime Minister Mark Rutte awarded the sisters the Mobilization War Cross, a military honor for service in World War II.

For her part, Freddie Oversteegen said that she coped with the traumas of the war “by getting married and having babies.” She married Jan Dekker, taking the name Freddie Dekker-Oversteegen, and raised three children. They survive her, as do her half brother and four grandchildren. Her husband, who worked at the steel company Hoogovens, is deceased.

In interviews, Ms. Oversteegen often spoke of the physics of killing — not the feel of the trigger or kick of the gun, but the inevitable collapse that followed, her victims’ fall to the ground.

“Yes,” she told one interviewer, according to the Dutch newspaper IJmuider Courant , “I’ve shot a gun myself and I’ve seen them fall. And what is inside us at such a moment? You want to help them get up.”

MY THOUGHT FOR AUGUST

Happy August, everyone!

Give yourself a big gold star if you’ve made it to this point of the Summer with even just a little bit of your sanity intact! 

Summer in general is a busy time of year for most of us with so many places to go and people to see, doing the things you waited all winter to do. Personal and household chores to catch up on. Not enough hours in the day. This Summer has been a doozy on the world front too...compounded by political haranguing with elections on the horizon, human destruction en mass and environmental disasters dominating the news almost daily.

And, know what? The only thing you need to free yourself from all of this is you, and the choice to not let the chaos of the world bring you down. When YOU make that choice, you liberate yourself and you are empowered to become your own change-maker. 

Now the key to finding the freedom we all seek is realizing that most of the stress we feel is self-made. 

Funny thing, but have you ever noticed that you worry about something that hasn't even happened?...It may happen. It may not happen. And most of the time, it doesn't happen. In other words, we fear the worst.

If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment friends, just take a few seconds to count the many blessings in your life. Smell the roses. And enjoy that absolutely perfect August weather God has been giving us in the best country in the world at the best time of year.

It is really not such a bad world after all!

Just slow down a bit and enjoy it!!!

Let the warm sun engulf you and the gentle breezes of August combine to sooth your soul.

BUSS ALDRIN CELEBRATED COMMUNION AFTER MOON LANDING

The Apollo 11 crew, from left: Commander Neil A. Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. On July 20th 1969 at 4:18 PM, EDT the Lunar Module "Eagle" landed in a region of the moon called the Mare Tranquillitatis, also known as the Sea of Tranquility.

Rev. David Shearman is a retired United Church Minister living in Owen Sound. He writes frequently in the Grey-Bruce This Week newspaper. In his most recent column, "Faith accompanied Apollo 11 to the moon" he made some interesting revelations that sent me off on a fact-finding mission that completely collaborated his fascinating story which I felt was too good not to give wings on Wrights Lane.

It hardly seems possible but it was 50 years ago that Apollo 11 landed on the moon, prompting Neil Armstrong's famous words, "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

It is not common knowledge that there was also a faith connection to that particular space mission.

It has been since disclosed that Buzz Aldrin, the other moon-landing astronaut, had received permission to celebrate the Christian sacrament of holy communion on the moon by NASA, "as long as he kept quiet about it."  Apparently NASA had been sued previously because the Apollo 8 astronauts had read from the Book of Genesis during their mission on Christmas Eve, 1968. While the law suit was dismissed, NASA was a bit apprehensive.

There were theological and logistical hurdles to Aldrin's request. An ordained Presbyterian elder, he sought and received permission to celebrate communion from the Presbyterian Church (USA). His pastor obtained a small silver chalice and Aldrin packed it, along with a few communion wafers and a small amount of wine in his personal flight kit.

Shortly after Eagle lunar touched down on the moon July 29, 1969, Aldrin pulled out the chalice, wine and bread, then spoke into the radio. "This is the LM pilot," he said, referring to the lunar module. "I would like to take this opportunity to ask every person listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his or her own way."

Aldrin then took a few moments to read silently from John 15:5, which he had scrawled on a three-by-five card: "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit; for you can do nothing without me."

He proceeded to perform the Christian ritual alone (Armstrong did not partake), making him the first person to celebrate a religious rite on heavenly body other than Earth.

"I poured the win into the chalice our church had given me," Aldrin recalled in a 1970 article in the Guidepost magazine. "In the one-sixth gravity of the moon the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the side of the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were communion elements."

Aldrin's congregation, Webster Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas, still celebrates Lunar Communion Sunday every year on the Sunday closest to the July 20 anniversary of the moon landing. And what about that small silver chalice Aldrin used?...It is safe in a Houston bank vault ad a replica is exhibited at Webster Presbyterian Church on special occasions.

The Bible did eventually get to the moon thanks to The Apollo Prayer Fellowship formed several years earlier by NASA's then chaplain (a scientist and Presbyterian minister) John Maxwell Stout and his wife Helen, in the wake of the Apollo 1 fire that killed three astronauts. The initiative was in response to one of the felled astronauts, Ed White 11, who wanted to put a Bible on the moon. It took a few tries, but on the Apollo 14 mission, 100 micro-filmed Bibles were carried to and returned from the moon by astronaut Edgar Mitchell.

As Rev. Shearman stated in his newspaper column: "Faith has always been a companion to human exploration...Even our first steps into the heavens."