Families and close relationships are where we learn to love, and where we are most easily hurt. Scripture calls us to "honour one another above yourselves" (Romans 12:10), and that begins with the people we live closest to.
These twelve stories about family and relationships, retold in our own words, include a poet's garden, a famous singer's proudest day, a mother on a mountain, a Depression-era Christmas, a silent breakfast, a folk tale, a Greek myth, a science-fiction film, a young pastor's awkward visits, a Kubrick film about marriage, a preacher's joke and a famous moon-landing legend. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- Coleridge's Garden: Letting Children "Choose for Themselves"
- Marian Anderson's Greatest Moment
- "It Wasn't Your Baby": The Mother Who Climbed the Mountain
- The Gift of "Us": A Christmas Without Presents
- Ask Him About His Childhood
- The Sky Maiden and the Empty Box
- The Fall of Vulcan: Wounded by Indifference
- "Each Other": The Lesson of the Film Contact
- The Gift of Presence: A Young Pastor's Awkward Visits
- Eyes Wide Shut: Desire, Deceit and a Marriage on the Brink
- The Sailing Sermon: A Pastor's Embarrassing Topic
- "Good Luck, Mr Gorsky": The Moon Landing Joke That Never Happened
Coleridge's Garden: Letting Children "Choose for Themselves"
In July 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was visited at his cottage in Nether Stowey by the radical writer John Thelwall.
Thelwall argued that it was unfair to shape a child's beliefs before the child was old enough to decide for himself. Coleridge did not argue back. Instead he took his guest out into his garden, which was badly overgrown, and called it his "botanical garden".
When Thelwall protested that it was covered in weeds, Coleridge explained that the garden had not yet reached the age of discretion. The weeds had simply taken the liberty to grow, and he had not wanted to prejudice the soil in favour of roses and strawberries. Coleridge retold the exchange more than thirty years later in his Table Talk.
Takeaway: No child grows up neutral. If we do not plant good things, other things will grow anyway. "Start children off on the way they should go" (Proverbs 22:6).
Source: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Table Talk (recorded 1830).
Marian Anderson's Greatest Moment
Marian Anderson was one of the great contralto singers of the twentieth century. Born in Philadelphia in 1897, she grew up in a poor African-American family and went on to be celebrated in concert halls across Europe and America.
The best-remembered moment of her career came in 1939. The Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let her sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., because she was Black. With the support of Eleanor Roosevelt and others, the concert was moved outdoors, and on Easter Sunday she sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of around 75,000 people, with millions more listening on the radio.
She had plenty of other triumphs to choose from. The conductor Arturo Toscanini reportedly told her that a voice like hers is heard only once in a hundred years. That same year she sang at the White House for President Franklin Roosevelt and for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth of Britain.
Yet, as the story is told by her manager Sol Hurok, when a reporter once asked her to name the greatest moment of her life, she chose none of these.
The greatest moment of her life, she said, was the day she was able to go home and tell her mother that she would not have to take in other people's washing any more.
Takeaway: Success means most when it blesses the people who sacrificed for us. Honouring our parents can be the proudest achievement of all.
Source: Alan Loy McGinnis, The Friendship Factor, recounting Sol Hurok; background from the Smithsonian.
"It Wasn't Your Baby": The Mother Who Climbed the Mountain
A parable said to come from the Andes; it has been retold by many speakers and writers.
High in the Andes there were once two tribes at war with each other. One lived in the lowlands, and the other lived high up in the mountains.
One day the mountain people swept down and raided the lowland village. Among the things they carried off was a baby, taken from one of the lowland families and carried back up into the mountains.
The lowlanders did not know how to climb the mountain. They did not know any of the trails the mountain people used, they did not know where the mountain people lived, and they had no idea how to track them across such steep ground.
Even so, they sent out their best fighting men to climb the mountain and bring the baby home.
The men tried one way up, and then another. They tried one trail after another. After several days of exhausting effort, they had climbed only a few hundred feet. Hopeless and beaten, they decided the cause was lost and began packing up their equipment to return to the village.
As they were getting ready to go down, they saw the baby's mother coming towards them. To their astonishment, she was walking down the very mountain they had not been able to climb. And on her back, strapped tightly, was the baby.
How could that be? One of the men greeted her and asked how she had managed it. We couldn't climb this mountain, he said. How did you do it, when we, the strongest and most able men in the village, could not?
She shrugged her shoulders and replied simply, It wasn't your baby.
Takeaway: Love gives strength that duty never can. God's love for us is like that mother's: he will climb any mountain to bring his children home.
Source: Parable told in Jim Stovall, You Don't Have to Be Blind to See (Thomas Nelson).
The Gift of "Us": A Christmas Without Presents
This story is attributed to a woman named Marjorie Tallcott. We have not been able to trace its original publication.
Marjorie Tallcott and her husband had one child, a six-year-old son named Pete, during the Great Depression. Like many families, they scraped through those years with very little, and as Christmas approached one year, the couple realised sadly that they would not be able to afford any presents at all.
A week before Christmas, they sat Pete down and explained that there would be no shop-bought presents that year. Then his father had an idea. But I'll tell you what we can do, he said. We can draw pictures of the presents we would like to give each other.
It was a busy week. Each of them worked away in secret on their pictures. When Christmas morning came, the family got up to find their thin little tree transformed, hung all over with picture presents.
The pictures held luxury beyond imagination. For Dad there was a long black limousine and a red speedboat. For Mum there was a diamond bracelet and a fur coat. For Pete there was a camping tent and a swimming pool.
Then it was Pete's turn to give his present. He brought out a crayon drawing of a man, a woman and a little boy with their arms around one another, all laughing. Under the picture he had written just one word: US.
Years later, Marjorie wrote that it had been the richest and most satisfying Christmas the family ever had.
It took a Christmas with no presents to remind them that the greatest gift we can offer one another is ourselves. That is also the great gift Christ offers us, not only at Christmas but every day of the year: himself. If he were to draw a gift for us, perhaps it would look a lot like Pete's.
Takeaway: The greatest gift we can give our families is ourselves. At Christmas God gave us exactly that gift: himself.
Source: Story attributed to Marjorie Tallcott, in Illustrations Unlimited.
Ask Him About His Childhood
Retold from a first-person story by the American writer Bob Perks, first shared around 2001.
It is a simple story about an ordinary breakfast, but it has been shared many times because so many families recognise themselves in it. Here it is, in our own words.
Bob Perks wrote that he had a favourite getaway: a local restaurant where he liked to go for a big, unhealthy breakfast of eggs, fried potatoes and bacon, with wholewheat toast to make it look healthy.
He often found remarkable stories in restaurants, he said. A restaurant is like a family dinner table taken out of the kitchen and put in a public place, only better, because someone else does the cooking and the washing up. All around him there were families eating together, friends catching up, business meetings and people like him who were simply there to relax and enjoy good conversation.
Except for the booth across from him, where there was only silence.
Two men were sitting there. One looked to be in his thirties, still wearing his work clothes and baseball cap. The other was about eighty, with a deeply lined, weathered face full of character. His white hair was messy from the woollen hat now lying on the table beside him, and he wore a heavy red plaid work jacket of the kind builders wear in winter.
But the old man did not look as if he was going anywhere. And neither was the conversation.
The younger man tried. He said he had really worked up an appetite that morning, shovelling and sweeping all that snow. Yeah, this is something, the old man replied. Then a long silence.
Suddenly the younger man said, Here they come, and pointed towards the door. He looked almost relieved, as if help had arrived to get the conversation going. A woman and a teenage girl, apparently the old man's daughter and granddaughter, came over and joined them. Hello, Dad, good to see you, the woman said as she sat down. Yep, the old man answered.
The silences grew even longer. At one point the old man said proudly that he was feeling really good. Oh, you look good, Dad, his son said, and one by one the others agreed. Then silence again. The waitress came and took their order.
Then the grandfather excused himself to go to the toilet, with a joke about how often that happens when you are old.
As soon as he was out of sight, the younger man said he had no idea what to say to him. We just sit here looking around, he said. He never talks. The woman agreed: she never knew what to say either. And the teenager added, He's old. What do you talk about with an old man?
Perks could not just sit there. He swallowed hard, half expecting to be told to mind his own business, and spoke up as he carried on eating: Ask him about his childhood.
They turned and stared at him. The woman asked whether he was talking to them.
Yes, he said. He knew it was none of his business, but did they realise what this man had to offer them? Could they imagine all he had seen in his lifetime? He probably had answers to problems they had not even discovered yet. He was a gold mine. Ask him what the snow was like when he was young, Perks said. He'll have a million stories. He isn't talking because nobody is asking.
Just then the old man came back around the corner, announcing cheerfully, and in rather more detail than anyone needed, that he felt a lot better now. The family all looked at Perks, who just shrugged. Old people talk about the facts of life too, he thought.
After a long pause, the granddaughter spoke up. Grandpa, she asked, when you were a kid, was the snow this bad?
His face changed. This was nothing, he told her, compared with the snow when he was a boy. Had he ever told them about the storm that buried his house? No, his son said. I don't think I've ever heard that one myself.
For the next twenty minutes the old man was in his element. At one point he even stood up to show them how high one of the drifts had been. Throughout the meal the others kept asking more questions. They laughed together, and he lit up like an actor on stage, performing the story of his own life.
As Perks was getting ready to leave, he heard the old man tell them that they had no idea what this meant to him. For all these years, he said, he had thought they were not even interested in what he had to say.
The woman said they had just assumed he did not want to talk. Nobody ever asked me anything, he replied. He had figured he was boring. It had been a hard life, and since his wife had died, he had felt he had nothing left to say. Perks noticed him nervously wringing his rough, work-worn hands.
Then the old man said that he and his wife had been like a song: he had made the music, and she had been the words. Holding back his tears, as men of his generation were taught to do, he wiped his eye and said there was no sense in talking if you have no words.
As Perks turned to go, he glanced back at the booth. The granddaughter smiled and waved at him as she put her arm around her grandfather's shoulders. She did not need to say a word.
Perks walked out into the snow thinking about how close that family had come to missing it all. The old man's stories had been there all along, waiting. All it had taken was one question, and someone willing to listen to the answer.
Takeaway: Many older people are silent not because they have nothing to say but because nobody asks. Honouring our elders starts with genuine questions.
Source: Bob Perks, "Ask Him About His Childhood" (2001).
The Sky Maiden and the Empty Box
An African folk tale, retold by the rabbi and writer Harold Kushner, among others.
Once upon a time, in a certain village, the cows suddenly began giving much less milk than usual. Nobody could understand why. So one young man of the tribe offered to stay up all night to find out what was happening.
He hid behind a bush and waited for many hours. At last, deep in the night, a beautiful young woman carrying a large bucket came riding down to earth on a moonbeam. She milked the cows, filled her bucket and rode back up into the sky.
The young man could hardly believe his eyes. The next night he came back, but this time he had set a trap, and he caught the young woman. He demanded to know who she was.
She told him she was a Sky Maiden, one of a people who lived in the sky and had no food of their own. It was her task to find food on earth and carry it home to her people. She begged him to let her go, promising to do anything he asked.
He agreed on one condition: he would set her free only if she agreed to marry him. The Sky Maiden accepted. She went home, and three days later she returned for the wedding, carrying a large box.
I will be your wife and I will make you happy, she told him. But you must promise never to look inside this box.
For many weeks the couple were very happy together. But one day, while his wife was out, the young man's curiosity got the better of him, and he opened the box. To his surprise, there was nothing inside at all.
When his wife came home, she could see at once from his face what he had done. You looked inside the box, didn't you? she said.
Yes, he admitted. But it was empty. What's so secret about an empty box?
The Sky Maiden was heartbroken. A tear ran down her cheek, and she told him that she could no longer live with him.
Why? he cried. What's so terrible about peeking into an empty box?
I'm not leaving because you opened the box, she replied. I'm leaving because you said it was empty. It wasn't empty. It was full of sky, full of the light and the air and the scents of my parents' home. When I went back to the sky that last time before our wedding, I filled that box with everything that was precious to me. How can I be your wife when what is most precious to me is just emptiness to you?
Takeaway: Relationships break down when we dismiss what matters most to the other person. Love takes the time to see what is in the other's "box".
Source: African folk tale, retold in Harold Kushner, Who Needs God (1989).
The Fall of Vulcan: Wounded by Indifference
A myth from ancient Greece, where the god was called Hephaestus; the Romans knew him as Vulcan. We follow the version told in H. A. Guerber's retelling, which uses the Roman names.
The myth tells the sad story of Vulcan, son of Jupiter and Juno, the king and queen of the gods. Vulcan was especially devoted to his mother, all the more because Jupiter's unfaithfulness and harsh treatment caused her so much pain. Vulcan showered her with affection and tried to comfort her whenever Jupiter neglected her.
One day, after Juno had flown into a jealous rage, Jupiter punished her by hanging her out of heaven on a golden chain.
Distressed by his mother's suffering, Vulcan grabbed hold of the chain and, pulling with all his strength, hauled her back into heaven. He was just about to set her free when Jupiter returned.
Furious that his son had interfered in what he considered a matter between husband and wife, Jupiter seized Vulcan and hurled him out of heaven.
The distance between heaven and earth was so great that, as Homer tells it in the Iliad, Vulcan fell for a whole day before he crashed to the ground. The fall injured his leg, and he was left lame for the rest of his life.
But in Guerber's telling, it was not the fall that hurt Vulcan most. It was his mother's response. Although he had risked everything to rescue her, she never made the slightest effort to find out whether he had reached the earth safely. Wounded by her indifference and ingratitude, Vulcan vowed never to return to Olympus, and withdrew to a lonely forge deep beneath the volcano Etna.
The myth captures a very human reality. Some of our deepest wounds come not from what people do to us, but from what they fail to do. Feeling unappreciated and unvalued can leave deep scars, and the closer the person, the deeper the cut. One of the great disciplines of any relationship is learning to notice the kindness of others and to thank them for it. In the myth, Vulcan's whole future might have been different if only his mother had shown him a little gratitude.
Takeaway: Some of the deepest wounds come not from what people do but from what they fail to do. A word of thanks or a simple "Are you all right?" can change a relationship.
Source: Homer, Iliad Book 1; H. A. Guerber, Myths of Greece and Rome (1893).
"Each Other": The Lesson of the Film Contact
The 1997 film Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis and based on the novel by the astronomer Carl Sagan, stars Jodie Foster as Dr Ellie Arroway, a scientist searching for signs of life beyond Earth. On the surface it is a film about aliens. But it raises deep questions about life, faith, science and our need for one another.
Ellie lost both her parents when she was young. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her beloved father died when she was still a child. She grows up with a deep sense of loneliness and a drive to find some meaning and purpose in life and existence. The path she chooses is science. She refuses to accept anything on faith. Only what can be demonstrated scientifically, she believes, can be accepted as true.
The other central character is Palmer Joss, played by Matthew McConaughey, a writer on religion who becomes an adviser in Washington. Ellie and Palmer are drawn to each other, but their relationship forces both of them to wrestle with the place of faith and reason in their lives.
In one memorable exchange, Ellie challenges Palmer to prove that God exists. She appeals to Ockham's razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the best. Which is more likely, she asks: that an all-powerful God made the universe and then left no evidence of himself, or that human beings invented God so that they would not feel so small and alone?
Palmer answers with a question of his own. Did she love her father? Yes, she says, very much. Then prove it, he replies. He admits that he cannot prove God's existence scientifically, but he tells her about an experience in which he felt overwhelmed by the presence of God. That is the basis of his faith. Ellie cannot accept it. If something cannot be proved, she believes, it cannot be known to be true.
Then one day, while Ellie is listening to the sky through giant radio telescopes, contact is made. A signal arrives from deep space, carrying detailed plans for a vast machine that seems designed to transport a human being across the universe.
The first machine is destroyed in an attack, and a man dies. A second machine is built, and Ellie is chosen to travel in it. When Palmer asks whether she is really willing to die for this, she tells him that all her life she has been searching for the reason we are here and who we are. If this is a chance to find even a small part of that answer, she believes it is worth risking a human life.
So Ellie is sealed into a small metal pod suspended above enormous spinning rings. The rings rotate faster and faster until the pod is dropped through the centre. To the people watching in the control room, the pod simply falls straight through into the safety net below. As far as they can tell, nothing has happened.
But inside, Ellie has an extraordinary experience. She hurtles through what seems to be a wormhole, a tunnel through space, and finds herself on a shimmering beach. A figure walks across the sand towards her. It is her father, or rather an alien being who has taken his form so that she will feel at ease.
In one of the film's most moving scenes, the being tells her that humans are a fascinating mix, capable of beautiful dreams and terrible nightmares. They feel lost and cut off and alone, it says, but they are not. In all their searching, it tells her, “the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
Ellie has to return. Back on Earth, she discovers that only seconds have passed. Now she faces the same scepticism she once showed towards Palmer. To everyone watching from outside, the simplest explanation is that nothing happened and she was deceived. Surely they cannot be expected to accept her story on faith alone? It is later revealed, though not to the public, that her recording device captured about eighteen hours of static, exactly as long as she says she was away.
Ellie is caught in a dilemma. Can she trust an experience she cannot prove? In a public hearing she says that she can. She cannot prove it, she cannot even explain it, but everything she is as a human being tells her it was real. She describes being part of something wonderful that changed her forever, a vision of how tiny and insignificant, and yet how rare and precious, we all are. We belong to something greater than ourselves, she says, and none of us is alone. Her only wish is that others could feel, even for a moment, the awe, humility and hope she felt.
The film suggests that faith and science need not be enemies, as Ellie once thought, but can work together, as Palmer believes. Some of the greatest truths, such as love, meaning and purpose, cannot be measured in a laboratory. And the alien's words express something Christians recognise deeply: we were made for relationship, with God and with each other.
Christians would add that the emptiness Ellie felt is ultimately filled not only by human love but by the God who made us for himself. Yet the film is right that we cannot face life alone. Some of the most important things we can ever know, that we are loved, that we belong and that our lives matter, come to us through other people.
Takeaway: We were made for relationship, with God and with one another. Loneliness is not solved by achievement or discovery, but by love.
Source: Contact (1997), directed by Robert Zemeckis, based on the novel by Carl Sagan.
The Gift of Presence: A Young Pastor's Awkward Visits
A story told by the American pastor and writer King Duncan about his early ministry. We retell it in our own words.
It was the late 1960s. King Duncan was twenty-two years old and serving as a student pastor for two small churches in northern Maryland.
One of his parishioners was Mrs Maude Stambaugh, the oldest living member of one of the churches. Frail and ill, she spent her final years being cared for in her daughter's home. She could not leave her room, except for trips to hospital twice a month for the blood transfusions that kept her alive.
Duncan found his first visit very hard. Mrs Stambaugh's illness was far advanced. Her hearing was so poor that he had to shout into her ear to be heard, and she was nearly blind.
When her daughter left the room, the young pastor thought to himself, What do I do now? Nothing in seminary had prepared him for this. He sat by the bed feeling awkward and intimidated. Finally he cupped his hands around her ear and shouted, How are you doing today?
She gave him a pleasant look and mumbled something he could not make out. He knew he ought to do something for her, but he had no idea what. For fifteen minutes he sat there in silence. At last he opened his New Testament and read some verses aloud, as loudly as he could, though he was not sure she could hear him.
He finished with a prayer, after wondering whether to whisper it or shout it, and decided simply to pray in a very loud voice. Then, before leaving, he cupped his hands around her ear one last time and shouted, Good to see you, Mrs Stambaugh.
It was not true, he later admitted. He had found the whole experience discouraging and deeply awkward, and he would rather have done anything than go back.
But he did go back, because he was her pastor. Every month or so he visited her. Each time he shouted a greeting into her ear, sat through fifteen minutes of painful silence, read from the Bible and prayed.
Eighteen months after his first visit, Mrs Stambaugh died. After the funeral, as Duncan was walking to his car, her daughter hurried after him. She said she had something for him: the last thing her mother had written before she died. The family thought he would want to see it.
She handed him a note. The handwriting took some time to make out. It read: Please tell my young pastor how much his visits meant to me.
Duncan learned what all of us must learn: our presence is one of the greatest gifts we can give. We may feel awkward, useless and discouraged, but simply being with someone in their dark hours is a precious gift.
It was a lesson he never forgot, and he went on to share it with many other pastors.
Takeaway: Job's friends did their best work when they simply sat with him in silence for seven days (Job 2:11–13). We do not need the right words to make a difference; we need to show up.
Source: King Duncan, as told in his sermon writing; widely reproduced in sermon collections.
Eyes Wide Shut: Desire, Deceit and a Marriage on the Brink
This film is sexually explicit and intended for adults. We describe its story in general terms only.
Eyes Wide Shut was one of the most talked-about films of 1999. It was the last film made by the director Stanley Kubrick, who died shortly after completing it, and it starred Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, who were then married in real life. The film explores sexuality, desire and intimacy, and it is very explicit.
Cruise plays Bill Harford, a successful New York doctor, and Kidman plays his wife, Alice. They have been married for nine years, have a young daughter and plenty of money, and seem to have it all.
Then one night, at a glamorous party, both of them flirt with other people. Back at home, in a tense conversation, Alice reveals that she once had a powerful fantasy about a naval officer she saw while they were on holiday. She never spoke to him and never acted on it, but the desire was so strong that she had imagined giving up her marriage for him.
Bill is shaken. Over the rest of the film, he wanders through a night of temptation. He comes close to an encounter with a prostitute, and as he drifts further into a shadowy world, he slips into a secret, masked gathering of wealthy people devoted to sexual excess. He is discovered and warned, and he comes to believe that his curiosity has put his life and others' in danger.
Running alongside Bill's journey is the steady loss of intimacy in his marriage. The secrets, suspicion and unspoken desires push Bill and Alice further and further apart. Towards the end of the film, Bill confesses everything to Alice. Both realise how destructive this tangle of desire and deceit has been, and how close they have come to losing everything good in their relationship.
The film ends in a toy shop, at Christmas, with their daughter nearby. Alice and Bill talk honestly. She tells him that she loves him and that they need to rebuild their intimacy together, and she says it bluntly.
Critics still argue about what Kubrick meant. But one message seems clear: sexual desire is powerful, able to build a relationship up or tear it down. Dark desires can lurk in unexpected places, in ourselves, in our partners and in respectable people all around us. They can seem thrilling, but they prove empty compared with the honest emotional intimacy of a good marriage. And the ending suggests that marriages are protected not by pretending desire does not exist, but by honesty and by pursuing passion within the relationship.
Takeaway: Scripture calls for marriage to be "honoured by all" and the marriage bed kept pure (Hebrews 13:4). Honesty and intimacy protect a marriage better than secrets ever can.
Source: Eyes Wide Shut (1999), directed by Stanley Kubrick.
The Sailing Sermon: A Pastor's Embarrassing Topic
A joke that has circulated among preachers for years. It contains some mild innuendo.
A young pastor was once asked to preach a sermon on sex. He was a rather reserved man, and as he prepared, he found himself blushing every time he had to write the word in his notes. So, to spare his embarrassment, he decided simply to write the letter S wherever the word was meant to go.
While he was working on it, his wife came into the study and looked over his shoulder. She noticed the letter S scattered all through the page and asked what the sermon was about.
Too embarrassed to tell even his own wife, the young pastor stammered, S… s… sailing! That's it. The sermon's about sailing.
His wife thought it was an odd topic for a sermon, but she supposed sailing might make a good picture of the Christian life, and she thought no more about it.
When Sunday came, she was ill with flu and missed the service. Her husband, however, preached a terrific sermon. He started nervously, but he warmed to the subject as he went on and handled it tactfully and helpfully.
The following week, a member of the congregation met the pastor's wife in town. Your husband preached a beautiful sermon on Sunday, the woman told her. He handled a difficult subject very sensibly, and I found what he had to say really helpful.
Well, that is a surprise, the pastor's wife replied. I didn't think he'd be much help to anybody on that subject. He's only ever done it twice. The first time he got sick, and the second time his hat blew off and he fell overboard.
Takeaway: Laughter has its place in church. And behind the joke is a serious point: talking honestly about sex and marriage is awkward, but the church does people a service when it does so wisely.
Source: Traditional preachers' joke; author unknown.
"Good Luck, Mr Gorsky": The Moon Landing Joke That Never Happened
This is an urban legend. Neil Armstrong never said these words, and the story is a joke that began circulating in the mid-1990s. We tell it, and the facts behind it, because it is so often repeated.
On 20 July 1969, as commander of the Apollo 11 mission, Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon. His first words on the surface, “That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” were broadcast to hundreds of millions of people.
According to the legend, just before he climbed back into the lunar module, Armstrong made a mysterious remark: Good luck, Mr Gorsky.
As the story goes, many people at NASA assumed it was a comment about a rival Soviet cosmonaut. But there was no Gorsky in either the Russian or the American space programme. Over the years people kept asking Armstrong what he had meant, and he only smiled.
Then, the legend says, in 1995, after a speech in Florida, a reporter asked him the question again. This time he answered, because Mr Gorsky had died.
When he was a boy growing up in a small Midwestern town, Armstrong supposedly explained, he had been playing baseball in the back garden with a friend. The friend hit a fly ball that landed next door, below the neighbours' bedroom window. The neighbours were Mr and Mrs Gorsky. As young Armstrong bent down to pick up the ball, he heard Mrs Gorsky shouting at her husband that he would get some intimacy from her on the day the boy next door walked on the Moon.
It is a good joke, but it is only a joke. NASA's transcripts of the Apollo 11 mission record no such remark. The story began circulating on the internet in 1995, and later that year Armstrong said he had first heard it as a joke told by the comedian Buddy Hackett. The fact-checking site Snopes treats it as a legend.
Takeaway: A good story is not the same as a true one. Before we repeat something, even from the pulpit, it is worth checking. "The simple believe anything, but the prudent give thought to their steps" (Proverbs 14:15).
Source: Urban legend; see Snopes, "Good Luck, Mr. Gorsky".
Final thoughts
A weedy garden, a mother's washing, a mountain climbed, a crayon drawing, a breakfast conversation, an empty box, a fallen god, a voice from the stars, a note from a dying woman, a marriage on the brink and two jokes. Each one points to the same truth: people matter more than things, and love must be shown.
For further reading, Sopranu has a summary of C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves, including his reflections on family affection and friendship, and a review of Gladiator and its theme of family.
Whom could you honour, thank or simply ask a question this week?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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