When I was a child, our house had a yard that seemed enormous to my child’s eyes. My personal world was large enough to make up for my ignorance of the greater world. My life filled up with playing rock school and statue and hide-and-go-seek and other important pursuits with my neighborhood friends. On summer evenings when we were allowed to play outside after dark, we chased lightning bugs and put them into jars, watching with awe as they blinked in a random pattern. I didn’t know it at the time, but one of my warm memories was actually, in the adult world, a hallmark of the Cold War.
Across the street from our red brick home so typical of the Midwest, lived Joy Main and her older daughter, Jean, who taught home-economics at the high school. I loved visiting them, especially because on one side of the fireplace a bench which had a lid that you could lift up held a treasure of games and puzzles. My favorite was Chinese checkers. Even Chinese checkers, however, paled in comparison to the Night of the Satellite.
I had little knowledge of the world outside of our little town or even of our state, except for those trips to visit relatives. I knew next to nothing about Russia, our Cold War “enemy.” Children don’t have a fully formed concept of enemies. Oh, we had spats between each other over the rules of the game or what constitutes a winner, or who pushed whom first. But blame and anger lasted only as long as it took to go home, go to the bathroom, and run back to the group, hoping not to have missed anything important. We weren’t interested in outer space, just Main Street space.
In the summer of 1953, Russia launched Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit the earth. Our local newspaper announced the night it would pass over our town. I imagine neighborhoods all over the country gathered to see it as we did over in the backyard of Joy and Jean. I don’t remember any sense of it being a party, just people standing around visiting. When someone shouted, “There it is!” Our eyes followed to where the person was pointing. We watched in silence as the small white speck moved steadily and silently from one horizon to the other then disappeared.
As a child I had no conception of the significance off what we were watching. No idea of the state of fear some people lived in as they built bomb shelters and stockpiled food. But after that night, life in our town went on as usual. Our part of the world seemed quite distant from the politics of Washington.
One thing Sputnik did was expand the idea of our place in the universe, the limits of our knowledge, and for some people the idea that we could get along fine without God because our own intelligence made all things possible.
But our neighborhood gang still played, still collected lightning bugs, still fought and made up. I still played Chinese checkers at Jean’s house. But while adults pretended to be god, the Almighty, I imagine, looked down shaking his head and maybe weeping a bit.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As the Scriptures say, “He traps the wise in the snare of their own cleverness.
1 Corinthians 3:19 (NLT)
