Be Your Best Issue 001
278 Days in Space
What an astronaut who could not come home taught me about men who believe they are stuck.
A letter from Jeremy
NASA Astronaut Butch Wilmore had every reason to be bitter.
He launched on the Boeing Starliner for what was supposed to be an eight-day test flight. He came home nine months later. Boeing's spacecraft lost thrusters and NASA judged it too risky to fly home. To the whole country he appeared to be stranded and abandoned. I asked if any of it left him a cynic.
“I'm not a cynic, I'm an American. It's a privilege to serve your country. It's a privilege to do those things that are difficult and hard.”
Capt. Butch Wilmore
The station had four crew quarters, and all four were taken when he arrived. Nobody had budgeted food for extra people, so for four and a half months he ate out of half-finished ration pouches headed for the trash. He slept in a bag in the middle of a working laboratory and rolled it up every morning, because the room was somebody else's workspace. Despite all of it, he was content.
His faith was never in NASA or Boeing or the government. It was in a sovereign God. A man who knows that is never really stuck or stranded.
I meet a lot of young men who believe they're victims of their circumstances — that they were dealt a bad hand by the generations that came before them. And maybe they were.
Capt. Wilmore didn't get to pick his circumstances. But he did choose how he would spend the first ten minutes of every morning for nine months, not knowing if or when he might ever get back to his family on Earth: he got up, made his bed, thanked God, and got to work. We should all do the same.
So roll up the bag. Look your best. Be your best — whether you wake up in a space station or somewhere here on earth.
That's the kind of man Jeremy's Razors is made for.