Ted and Jo Stone

I don't remember how we met. 
Anyway, with my woebegone feeling because Ted wasn't pastoring a church and I didn't have a built-in job description, I was blind as one of the bats that comes zooming over my head in the early morning hours as I snooze on my deck.  Gratia calls.  Who is Gratia? ...an astronaut's wife who maybe heard me on radio, calls and asks if I will come and speak to a few high school kids in Clear Lake where the Johnson Space Center is located.  The "few kids" turn out to be a few hundred in a high school auditorium....and thus began four decades of a relationship with Gratia and Jack Lousma, now (sort of) retired from the space program.  On my wall hang three pictures of the lift off of Jack's ship, the Columbia, at Canaveral. Ted, son Jeff and I attended, then raced back to Houston in time for Jack's and his crew's re-entry.  Another picture on my wall is taken from one-hundred-seventy-five miles above the Mediterranean, the Sea of Galilee, the Dead Sea and the Suez Canal , and one more photo of the Columbia landing in White Plains, New Mexico because Houston was locked in by a storm, preventing their landing.   We hot-footed it back to Houston from Canaveral in time to be in Mission Control for Jack's landing. There we sit, midst a hundred or so scientists and NASA personnel, listening to Christian Jack up in space talking with Christian Steve in front of the monitors. "What are you doing, Jack?" "I'm opening my Bible to have devotions with my crew. We're reading Proverbs 3:5 & 6." ...which he proceeds to read out loud as scientists and NASA personnel listen in.  Long after Jack has been out of the Program, he continues to speak and host crowds of people who continue to visit Canaveral. Gratia has gone along with Jack for years for his speaking engagements,  sits by a premiere's or president's wife and quietly tells her about Jesus while Jack is showcased. For years, Gratia called me and said, "Jo,  I've got this idea!" ...and the shivers would race up my spine because I knew we were in for an adventure that would bring the Gospel to her collection of people. You wouldn't believe some of the wacko things we did. The wife of one of the guys that landed on the moon came to Jesus on one of those "wacko" adventures.  Years later, we were in Michigan speaking to Gratia's collection of people in Ann Arbor: street kids, Chinese students, U of Michigan students and a few faculty when it became evident that Ted was not "tracking". We flew home and started the downward, then upward trip that ultimately took Ted into space....with Jesus.  Gratia and Jack are back in Texas after years in Michigan. She's cookin' up something, and maybe I'll get a call before long:  "Jo, I've got an idea..." Whatawoman! ...and what a Man is Jack Lousma.

Nearly every day someone comes or calls that has been alongside us in partaking in the Greatest Story Ever Told, somewhere in these United States or in another country.  Just now I was feeling  like all the fun stuff is over and the phone rang, and it's Gideon: on his way home to the Navajo Indian Reservation where he lives with his dear wife, Alta.  Is that relationship over?  Probably not. My life is quiet now, because it has to be. My body is tired, but darn it, my heart just won't stop yearning for more people to come to Christ before He "raises me UP"!