I don't know how long I lay there, eyes fixed on the starry skies above. Even as a five-year-old, I was a free-range kid. So, it was a while before anyone came looking for me that night.
Did I see Sputnik (Russian for "fellow traveler"), the Earth’s first artificial satellite?
I did see something arcing across the night sky—blinking, blinking. But really, who knows? There is some controversy over whether the satellite was actually visible to the naked eye. And, on top of that, Sputnik II had launched just one month later. Even if I did see something, it might not have been the very first one.
That said, I vividly recall lying on my back in our backyard on a chilly winter night. Sputnik was all anyone had talked about for weeks. I had gotten it into my head that I would be able to see it pass overhead that night. So there I was, bundled up against the cold, a light frost barely visible along the tips of the grass blades.
In October 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik, the world was electrified. Sputnik not only explosively kicked off the "space race" between the USA and the USSR, it changed the trajectories of millions of lives. Whole career categories appeared that had only ever existed in science fiction. One example: In his great memoir Rocket Boys, Homer Hickam grew from a coal miner’s son to a NASA engineer.
Sputnik not only changed the mid-century world, it created the world in which we now live.
The impact of that wintry night's vigil, and the events surrounding it, stayed with me for a long, long time. Years later, I recall getting the thought that we—Sputnik, the moon, and me—were all three speeding through space that night, circling the sun together.
In a very real sense, we were all Sputniks in the fall of 1957, "fellow travelers" moving along a celestial path. Ideally, we would all still be traveling together. But Earth was too big, Sputnik too close. After three short months, the relative enormity of Earth, with our strong gravitational field, pulled Sputnik from its course and eventually to its destruction.
In a spiritual sense, the apostle Paul raises a similar concern in this week's Romans passage. His focus is on the then-current dispute of whether followers of Jesus could eat meat sacrificed to idols. But make no mistake, "to eat or not to eat" is not the point. He makes it clear that neither those who eat such meat, nor those who refuse to do so, has the authority to judge the other.
God reserves to Himself the power of judgment. It is not our purview.
But there's another message in the passage, a more subtle one: "We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves." In this, Paul makes an excellent case for us to view each other as "fellow travelers" on individual spiritual journeys—separate beings, but God as our common destination. Like Sputnik and all those satellites that followed, we can be pulled off course, if you will, our focus pulled away by disputable matters. Or, perhaps worse, we may be the larger body, overwhelming the smaller ones with our insistence they must act as we think they should.
We are not to think ourselves so important (or so in-the-right) that we pass judgment on those who oppose us on disputable matters.
We are to love our fellow travelers more than we love our opinion.
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PHOTO and “Sputnik’s Legacy”:
https://physicsworld.com/a/sputniks-legacy/
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Join us Friday morning for DaySpring’s Lectionary Breakfast. You can find us at 8:00 on Zoom* and in Waco at Our Breakfast Place. We meet in the function room (outside entrance, near the back). They food is quite tasty, the Bible discussion quite lively, and the folk quite lovely ... fellow travelers all.
Satellites and free-range children must be checked at the door.
Blessings,
Steve
*Zoom link (Zoom allows you to mute the camera and the microphone if you don’t wish to be seen or heard):
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89947678414
SCRIPTURES FOR SUNDAY AND THE COMING WEEK
Find them here:
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts/?y=17134&z=p&d=75
Print them from here:
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdfs/Ax_Proper19.pdf
Exodus 14:19-31
Psalm 114 or Exodus 15:1b-11, 20-21
Genesis 50:15-21
Psalm 103:(1-7), 8-13
Romans 14:1-12
Matthew 18:21-35
Proper 19 (24) (September 13, 2026)
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