A couple of days after Easter, I found myself sitting in the Atlanta airport when my phone buzzed. It was my mom telling me to find a TV if I could. The crew from Artemis II was about to land. If you were around during Holy Week, you might remember I mentioned that mission before. I wish I could say it was a one-time illustration, but clearly it stuck with me.
So there I was, standing in an airport, watching a spacecraft reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. It came barreling down from space at around 25,000 miles per hour, moving thirty times the speed of sound, and then, somehow, gently landed in the ocean just off the coast of San Diego. It is hard to describe what it feels like to watch something like that. The engineering, the precision, the risk. Everything has to go exactly right.
But what stayed with me was not just the landing. It was the perspective. The images from that mission are breathtaking. When astronauts orbit the moon and look back at Earth, our entire world becomes something small enough to take in at a glance. A pale blue dot, suspended in darkness. It has a way of rearranging your thoughts.
The things that feel overwhelming do not disappear, but they shift. Problems that once felt all-consuming begin to loosen their grip. You realize, maybe for the first time in a while, that the world is both bigger and smaller than you thought. Bigger in its vastness, smaller in how tightly we tend to hold onto our own piece of it.
But even more than the images, what stayed with me were the words of the astronauts themselves. One of them described how, over the course of the mission, the crew became deeply connected. Not just professionally, but personally. They trained together, prepared together, faced uncertainty together, and relied on each other completely. That kind of experience binds people together in a way that is difficult to explain from the outside.
And then she said something simple that has been sitting with me ever since. Looking down at Earth from over 250,000 miles away, she realized that all of us are part of a crew too. Not just metaphorically. Not in some poetic sense. We are actually in this together.
Every person. Every life. Every story. Connected.
It is easy to forget that. We live in a world that constantly pushes us toward separation, comparison, and isolation. We measure ourselves against each other, retreat into our own concerns, and convince ourselves that what we are carrying is ours alone. But that is not the truth.
The truth is that we are bound together by something deeper than preference or proximity. We are connected by our shared humanity, and even more than that, as people created and loved by God. That kind of connection is not something we build from scratch. It is something we wake up to.
The Gospel of John returns to this again and again. Not as an abstract idea, but through the life of Jesus. In the way he moves toward people, speaks to them, and refuses to leave anyone outside the reach of God’s love. That includes the disciples who locked themselves in a room out of fear, and it includes Thomas.
Thomas has carried a nickname for centuries that has not done him any favors. Doubting Thomas. It sticks in a way that feels unfair when you look more closely at his story. He was not there when Jesus first appeared to the other disciples. He missed it. And when they told him what had happened, he could not bring himself to believe it.
If we are honest, that feels familiar. We know what it is like to miss something, to be on the outside of an experience everyone else seems certain about, to hear truth spoken with confidence and still feel unsure. Thomas does not pretend. He says exactly what he needs in order to believe.
And Jesus meets him there.
There is something steady and reassuring about that. Jesus does not shame Thomas for his questions or distance himself because of his doubt. He comes close and offers what Thomas needs. And in that encounter, Thomas moves from uncertainty to one of the clearest declarations of faith in the entire Gospel.
That moment matters, not because it proves something about Thomas, but because it reveals something about Jesus. Faith is not a straight line. It is not a single moment that settles everything forever. It is a process, a movement, a journey that includes both clarity and confusion.
There are moments when belief feels strong and certain, when everything seems to line up and make sense. And then there are moments when it does not, when questions rise to the surface and doubt feels closer than confidence. Those moments are not interruptions to faith. They are part of it.
That is why the language of “continuing to believe” matters so much. Belief is something that grows over time. It deepens, stretches, and sometimes even wrestles. It is shaped through experience, through questions, and through encounters we did not expect.
When I think back to that image of Earth from space, I keep coming back to the same realization. We are all part of the same crew. Not because we have everything figured out, not because we agree on everything, and not because our lives look the same, but because we are moving through this world together.
We are all navigating questions, carrying stories, and trying to make sense of what it means to believe and to trust. And in the middle of that, God keeps showing up. Sometimes in ways that are unmistakable, and sometimes in ways that are easy to miss.
In creation. In quiet moments. In conversations that linger. In the steady reminder that we are not alone.
There is something sacred about the way children ask why. They are not trying to challenge. They are trying to understand. They have not yet learned to hide their questions or pretend they already know. They live with a kind of openness that many of us lose over time.
But the invitation of faith is not to have all the answers. It is to remain open. To keep bringing our questions to God and trusting that we will be met there.
Thomas did that, and what he found was not rejection, but presence. Not distance, but nearness. That same invitation is still open to us.
We are not being asked to manufacture perfect belief. We are being invited into a relationship that can hold both our faith and our questions. A relationship that meets us where we are and gently moves us forward.
Step by step.
We really are part of the same crew. Not drifting alone, not left to figure it out on our own, but held together by the same grace and carried by the same love.
And that love has already done the hardest part. It has already stepped into the darkness, faced what felt final, and made a way where there was none. The resurrection is not just something we look back on. It is the reason this whole journey is possible.
So we keep going. Not because everything is easy or clear, but because we are not alone. And because the One who meets us in our questions is the same One who walks with us through every part of the journey.
And if that is true, then maybe the goal is not to eliminate the questions.
Maybe the goal is to stay in the journey long enough to discover who is meeting us there.
