Photographs That Are Out of This World (Literally)

The following program is recorded content created by the Truth Network. My guest today has spent more time in space than any other American man.

Oh, and he took some pictures when he was there, too. It's time for The Line of Fire with your host, biblical scholar and cultural commentator, Dr. Michael Brown, your voice for moral sanity and spiritual clarity. Call 866-34-TRUTH to get on The Line of Fire. And now, here's your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Boy, I am really looking forward to this interview today. It'll be at the bottom of the hour where we'll bring on former NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who not only spent over 500 days total in space, but took more pictures of Earth than any other astronaut and is a committed believer. So, that'll be the bottom of the hour. Michael Brown, it's just me until then.

Michael Brown, glad to be with you. 866-34-TRUTH. So, I'll take calls on any subject under the sun, anything you want to talk to me about, any question you want to raise of any kind like I do on other days.

Sometimes I do it later in the show. Today, we'll try to do it earlier in the show. 866-34-TRUTH. Tomorrow, I plan to get into some really interesting information about genetics and the Jewish people. So, those joining me Thursday, I think you're going to be enriched and enlightened.

And, of course, we end the week by taking your calls, the entire broadcast on Friday. Okay, 866-34-TRUTH, if you'd like to ask me a question or weigh in on something now. In preparation for our time with Jeffrey Williams, former NASA astronaut and committed Christian, as we prepare for this conversation, I want to step back and talk to you personally about why I'm sure about the reality and existence of God. Now, I'm not saying this to prove something to you if you're an atheist or an agnostic or former believer with a lot of questions. This is not for me to give you arguments in a debate where I'm going to try to win you over to hear my perspective. I simply want you to understand why I believe what I believe.

Maybe it will be edifying, maybe it will be encouraging, maybe it will be challenging, but my goal is not to persuade you as much as to testify, okay? Growing up, I never questioned the existence of God, but I was not a God believer. I remember thinking as I was a teenager doing drugs and for the first time hearing the Gospel, saying, well, if there really is a God, He knows I'm a good person, basically.

Why? Because my justification, I remember it vividly that if I was walking into a store and there was like an old lady, I'd open the door for her, or if I saw some homeless guy on the side of the street, I'd give him a few cents. So, I was basically a good person if there was a God, but I didn't think about it much.

And which religion was right, I was Jewish, just assumed it was true, but I was not a religious Jew. So, how is it I got from that being kind of nonchalant, not questioning the existence of God? Absolutely not an atheist. Atheism didn't really occur to me. I didn't have a lot of philosophical thought about it. I was just a kid living my life and now into all kinds of fleshly expression and sin and hardcore rock and the whole bit, but now something happens in my life.

I say now we go all the way back to 1971. The first real evidence I had of God working in my life, I was not aware was God at all. I was no understanding this had anything to do with God initially, but the Holy Spirit began to convict me of sin. All right, I'm simply sharing my own story. I'm testifying.

I'm testifying. What happened was that people in this little church where my friends were going and I had gone to pull them out, they began to pray for me and I didn't know they were praying for me. Maybe I thought here and there, you know, the people praying, but it was not a conscious thought.

You know what I'm saying? I knew I thought they thought I was some terrible sinner, but there was not some conscious thought in my mind. Nowhere in my consciousness these Christians are praying for me and therefore I'm feeling the way I'm feeling. Zero. No thought whatsoever. All I knew was this. I'd be laying in bed at night high on drugs thinking how cool I was. God, I stole money from my father. He doesn't even know it. I mean, it seemed shameful for me to say these words now, but that's how lost I was.

Checked my best friends. They thought this drug money I got stolen. I used it for myself. It was cruel to this one and nasty to this one. And I would lay in bed literally thinking how cool I was with all of my sinful exploits. Talking about demented.

Talk about what Proverbs says, every way of a man is right in his own eyes. And then, out of the blue, for no known reason, there was nothing that happened. There was not some conflict with my parents that brought guilt or conflict with my friends that brought guilt.

Nothing had changed. I was using the same drugs and I'm laying in bed at night high and next thing I start to feel miserable. Miserable. I feel like I want to crawl out of my skin. I'm so unclean and such a wretch and doing such evil things to people that I love, the people that I'm close to. You say, well, what did you do?

I had no idea it was conviction. I had no idea it was the Holy Spirit. I just thought, well, whatever's going on in my body, I'm not doing drugs that keep me up. I'll just do the downs and the heroin and that kind of stuff, the barbiturates and the drugs that are keeping me up at night.

I'm going to have to stay away from those. That's what I thought I needed to do. But there's no question it was the Holy Spirit invading my life with conviction. John 16, beginning in verse 8, when the Holy Spirit comes, He'll convict the world of sin, of righteousness and judgment.

That was the first thing that happened. Next, as God began to reveal Jesus to me, okay, I said for the first time, November 12th of 71, for the first time I said, I believe. I believe Jesus died for my sins.

I believe He rose from the dead. I don't know where that faith came from. I know my friends had been sharing the gospel with me. We'd been talking about spiritual things day and night for weeks and weeks leading up to that and there was more positive going on in my heart and my mind. But still, that could just be a suggestion, right? The fact that you now believe something you didn't believe, it was not like this overwhelming revelation.

It was like, yeah, I do believe it. But I'm not willing to change. I'm not going to give up the drugs. I'm not willing to quit doing what I'm doing, living the way I'm living.

No way. So, now I have a conflict. So, I pray.

November 12th, 1971, second time I'd been in this little Italian Pentecostal church in Queens, New York. So, I pray. I said, God, you know I'm not willing to stop doing drugs. So, when I go home, when I go home and I get high, don't let it have any effect on me.

I had it all planned out. There was one drug called PCP or angel dust and I would smoke enough of this to knock a horse out because I had a very high resistance to drugs. It used to be called Drug Baron Iron Man in my foolish days of rebellion because I could put massive quantities of this junk in my body and just seem to walk away fine. So, I knew what I was doing and cocaine was the new drug that had just come to town. I'd been shooting heroin.

I was 16 then. I'd been shooting heroin since I was 15 and used LSD since I was 14. But cocaine was the new drug in town and I just purchased a large amount and then I was going to deal it, sell it, and I tried it once, but didn't really take a high enough dose. So, I was going to really lay it on and shoot cocaine that night. So, I, brand new, right, did this whole thing.

I said, God, if you don't want me to do this, don't let it have any effect on me. So, I smoked a large quantity of PCP and in the past that drug had even gotten the better of me, Drug Bear. I smoked this large joint of it and then I shoot a large amount of cocaine and I feel my heart starts to pound and stop, stop, stop, boom, stopped right there. Nothing. I thought, okay, something's going on here.

Something is going on. So, the next five weeks, I go to church one night, I shoot heroin the next, back and forth, back and forth. I smoked pot morning, afternoon, evening. Next day, don't get high, go to church, back and forth.

Finally, December 17th, 1971. I can't wait to get to the church service. Now remember, in those days, I've been seeing Jimi Hendrix in concert, Led Zeppelin in concert, Jethro Tull, Grateful Dead, The Who, and these other bands, The Doors, and playing with my rock band every day and rehearsing and just playing this loud, crazy music. Now, this little church service with Pastor's wife playing piano and we're seeing these little ditty hymns, There's Within My Heart a Melody, Jesus Whispers Sweet and Low, Blessed Assurance, Jesus is Mine, there's Power, Power, Wonder, Working Power. These little ditty hymns, two or three hymns, and I become completely overwhelmed with this extraordinary sense of joy.

And I think, where did this come from? You've got to remember, the music is so foreign, the culture is so foreign. And even though I'm not a religious Jew, I've never been in church before. These are the first times I've walked into a church building, a Pentecostal. I mean, everything about it is foreign to me and the music completely foreign to me.

Totally, totally. Again, I'm not trying to prove something to you as an atheist or an agnostic or a skeptic or someone really questioning or going through deconstruction. I'm simply sharing my story with you and some of the reasons that I believe in God that I am sure of his reality, his existence. So, I realize that this joy I'm experiencing must be what the church calls the joy of the Lord. And of course, it's in the Bible, the joy of the Lord is our strength. And I immediately, you ever have something like you get in a car accident and your life kind of passes in front of you?

Just, I thought back to the greatest highs, the greatest joys I've ever had, whether it be winning something in sports, whether it be doing something good for a friend, whether it was, of course, all the drug highs and the music highs. And I thought, no, this is different. This is of a different quality.

This is not just quantitative. This is of a different quality. This is something else. This must be what they call the joy of the Lord. And right then, got a deep revelation of the love of God. I saw myself as filthy from head to toe, covered in mud and dirt, and the blood of Jesus washed me clean. And he put these beautiful white robes on me.

And I was going back and playing in the mud. And I said, I said, God, I'll never put a needle in my arm again. I was totally set free from that moment on.

I mean, these are serious problems and addictions. I'm talking about instantly set free from that moment on. And then the supernatural answers to prayer.

Now it wasn't always just push a button and get an answer. But I'm talking about undeniable, supernatural, clear answers to prayer. And then just the evidences of God being with you, or the evidences of God speaking and leading.

These things have been part of my life now for 51 years. For me to deny God's reality would be to deny reality itself. And I could give you story after story. We'd take months and months of radio broadcasts just to recount some of the stories and testimonies of what I've experienced over the decades in terms of faithfulness and goodness and reality of God. And then as I began to really get to know God's Word, the unmistakable prophecies. Look, Jewish history told in world advance how we'd be scattered around the world, how Jerusalem would be a city of controversy for the whole world, how we'd be decimated and yet preserved by God and yet restored back to the land.

And the messianic prophecies laid out. And then when you add in the other things, I'm not a scientist, but you add in the evidence within creation and the evidence within human creation, right down to the DNA and on and on it goes. It's so overwhelmingly clear to me that God is real. But for me, first and foremost, it is based on what I experienced in him, his reality coming to know him. As Leonard Ravenhill used to say, a man with an experience is never at the mercy of a man with an argument. The intellectual stuff for me came second. Experiential stuff came first.

All right, we'll be right back. I'm Paul Burnett, a board certified doctor of holistic health, and I want to take this opportunity to talk to you about the importance of healthy blood flow and how it's enhanced by a miracle molecule known as nitric oxide. You see blood vessels release nitric oxide, which increases blood flow known as something called vasodilatation. At TriVita, we take blood flow seriously for our members and we've developed a nitric oxide plus supplement that has been formulated with natural ingredients designed to maximize nitric oxide production in our blood vessels, which increases blood flow. You may be wondering why you don't have as much energy as you used to. One study that I came across revealed that by the age of 40, we only produce about 50% of the nitric oxide production as compared to our twenties. And by the age of 70, the study showed that we're only producing about 15 to 25%.

I have good news. As we age, there's another way for our body to increase nitric oxide production, and that's by converting nitrates and vegetables like beetroot into nitric oxide. Bottom line, with more nitric oxide, we stimulate more blood flow to our vital organs and we experience more energy while supporting healthy blood pressure.

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Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Hail, welcome to all of our new listeners and viewers. So glad to have you as part of our regular audience. If you don't get our emails, I'd love to put you on our welcome tour. I'll tell you more about my own personal testimony, my own background from LSD to PhD.

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Use the code BROWN25. Okay, I've got my guest, Jeffrey Williams, astronaut Jeffrey Williams coming on at the bottom of the hour. But I just want to share a little bit more about my own personal witness in terms of my faith, my belief.

I was talking to Dr. Mark Stengler, doctor of the decade, a dear friend, and my personal doctor when we were on our trip to Israel together. And as brilliant as he is and as learned as he is, he's like a little kid. He's smiling and laughing about the latest insights in terms of God's reality and stuff and just very enthusiastic.

He's got this childlike enthusiasm about the truth of God and the reality of God and the veracity of the Scriptures. So we're talking about DNA. And he was, I mean, this stuff is just so mind boggling. If you took each letter of our DNA coding and read it, I think, one letter a second, it would take 96 years or some figure like that, close to 100 years to read every letter of the coding. And he was saying, think of this, this is written, the moment of conception your DNA is formed. And it's written, encoded in every single cell in our body.

And if I remember right, he said there's 60 cells, you could fit 60 cells on the head of a pin. And this DNA is giving instructions to the body to do certain things. It's just mind boggling. Look, again, I'm not a scientist. But I've had learned brilliant scientists, chemists and astronomers and others on the air, biologists, brilliant who will, as scientists, will talk about the reality of God, the existence of God, and how science points to God.

But I mean, I see these things and it's mind boggling to me. And I can't imagine the universe functioning, the world functioning, Earth functioning, human beings functioning, the animal world functioning without the handiwork of God. But that's not the basis of my faith.

The basis of my faith is I've come to know Him and experience Him firsthand and have now walked with Him over 50 years. Let me give you two tiny examples that happened as we were new believers. So, my best friends, John and Kerry, were over at my house. We'd hang out most nights and my house was the place to do it. And we'd sometimes play quiet acoustically at night because we couldn't play loud during our normal rock rehearsal.

That was in the afternoon. And so, we're new believers, but we're still playing together and doing different stuff. So, we'd just jam acoustically and have some fun, just kind of quietly. I'd sit there on a drum pad and they'd have their guitar and bass real low.

But now we're believers, we're talking about the things of the Lord and so on. They're walking home. It's late. We're in a little town called Island Park. They're walking home and it's too late to go anywhere to get anything to eat.

Everything's closed. But they were hungry. They really wanted something to eat. And as they're walking down the road, the main road in Little Town, Warwick Road, they're walking to the one traffic light at that part of the town. And right there in the yellow, so one lane basically in each direction. And then you get your little stripes in the middle and you got the traffic light right there in a neatly folded bag.

It's sitting right there in the yellow lines at the traffic light. It's like a bag from a deli, deli contestant. And there was one they really liked in town. And in fact, they would each get a particular sandwich, but they had a custom made.

I want it with this meat minus this plus this. So, it is very custom, very specific to each of them from a particular deli a few blocks down. And there's the bag. Just curious, like what is this?

It was just on a side or it was precisely put in the middle of the two yellow lines there. And this is one of the ones in the bag, kind of intrigued. They open it up and to their shock, it's their two sandwiches made exactly the way they liked them. It's like, what in the world?

So, of course, they ate it. It's like, it's got to be good, must be a gift from God. Okay, I know it's a little thing.

I know it's a minor thing. And maybe you can come up with some kind of explanation, but this kind of stuff is like, whoa, that's wild. And then I remember there was one of our friends, he was in and out. He never really got soundly with the Lord, sadly.

A heavy drug user, a twin brother, Jimmy and Johnny. And Johnny was over at our house and got this bad gash, a chunk of wood. Oh, I didn't even think about it hurt, but I remember it took a chunk out of his thumb.

It took a chunk out. But he was just new in the things of God. It's like, pray for me, pray for me, guys. He was a tough guy, but it's like a chunk of his flesh taken out. So, we just prayed together for him in Jesus' name.

In Jesus' name. Literally, a couple days later, we were looking, it's like, not only was the thumb without a gash in the hole, it was normal. There's no possible human way that could happen. We were all stunned, like, what in the world? And I prayed for other things and just see them happen.

I'm not saying that you just press a button and always happens, but I mean, here, I'll give you one other tiny little one. I'm sitting in a church service and Norm and I just felt so close to the Lord those days. I felt the presence of the Lord.

And it'd been like a day and a half, right? Just I'd prayed, I'd been with the Lord, I'd worshiped. I didn't feel anything.

I'd been in churches, I didn't feel anything. And I'm sitting there, playing the drums, we brought our instruments in to join with the pastor's wife, the piano player. And I'm sitting there behind the drums, I'm saying, Lord, I just want to feel your presence again. And suddenly I just feel this joy and this peace come over me.

And I thought, what a baby. What, I can't go a few minutes without feeling God's presence? And just as I'm saying this to the Lord, that second, the pastor, the pastor speaks in tongues and interprets and says, and the Lord says to you, yes, I'm with you always, even to the end of the age, whether you feel me or not. I mean, that second, now I know these are little things, but when you have enough of these happening on a regular basis, and then when you see a pattern on much bigger, broader, massive levels over a period of over 50 years, to deny the reality of God is to deny reality. I'm not saying that I have just proven it to you. I'm saying that's my testimony.

And I wanted to share it with you. Okay, we come back, we're going to be joined by astronaut Jeffrey Williams. I cannot wait for this interview. And we'll tell you about his book as well, called The Work of His Hands.

Yeah. Stay right here. We'll be right back. Hey friends, this is Dr. Michael Brown. I want to invite you to join our support team.

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Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks, friends, for joining us on The Line of Fire, 866-34-TRUTH. If you've got an astronaut question, we have confirmed our guest is available and just trying to connect here. So we will do that momentarily. Once again, thank you to everyone who prays for me and for our ministry.

I can't thank you enough. We're on the front lines by calling. My head is like the tip of the battering ram which gets run into the wall to bring the wall down. It's my calling and there's grace in me to do it. And I'll tell you from the heart, I do it with joy.

I do it with faith. I'm not down. I'm not depressed. I'm not discouraged. I'm not feeling like worn out and throwing the towel.

No, I'm chafing to see God move even more and chafing to run my race even more effectively and stirring my own heart. Come on, man. Go for it. Do it. Stand. Speak.

Act. And I know so much of that is because of your prayer support. Thanks for all those that stand with us financially. You undergird us and help us to reach so many in American around the world.

I just want to thank you always from the heart. All right, check this out. I mean, how many people have a bio like this?

During his six months aboard the International Space Station in 2006, this is only part of the time I guess was in space, Colonel Jeffrey N. Williams orbited the earth more than 2,800 times and took more photographs of earth than any astronaut in history. Every shot contains lessons about God's creation. Oh, my. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us. I've been looking forward to speaking with you. Hello, Michael.

Great to be with you today. So, let me ask you this. How is it that you first got interested in becoming an astronaut? Well, it goes back to my West Point days, the military academy in the late 1970s. And I had some mentors there that were helicopter pilots that had just come back from Vietnam. And I was interested in math and science. I was studying engineering there as well. And all of that kind of coalesced.

1978, the first army astronaut was selected by NASA to be an astronaut, Bob Stewart. So, I knew that even in the army I had a chance. And it all kind of just kind of grew over a couple years there.

I remember reading the book The Right Stuff by Tom Wolf in those years as well. Wow. All right. So, I mean, obviously there are things that you experienced day after day. Was it 534 days total in space? Is that correct?

Yeah. I flew four times to space. The first one was in 2000 for 10 days on a space shuttle flight at the beginning of building the space station. And then I went back three more times to the space station.

Each of those three times were for six months. So, I think you read some words from my book, which actually was written about the second flight. So, I had another year in space after that book was written.

So, more than any American man in history, correct? Yeah. Peggy Whitson, my classmate, was extended on orbit the year after I got my last flight.

And she actually exceeded my time. Yeah. That's an American man. Yep. Yeah. There you go. Yeah.

But at the time, that was a new American record. All right. So, here's the thing. I said all that to say, I'm going to ask you to describe things.

But again, I have no point of comparison, right? I've spent probably hundreds of my life flying in the back in planes and stuff. So, for you to convey things, the pictures do it.

Again, the book is the work of his hands, where you show these pictures. But can you try to paint a picture for us as difficult as it is to convey what it feels like to be on your first flight and then to actually be in outer space looking at the Earth? What does it feel like?

Well, I mean, there's all kinds of feelings that come out of that. Of course, we trained for several years leading up to the launch and then anticipating the rocket launch as the first big sensation. It takes less than nine minutes to get to orbit. And you're feeling in the space shuttle about three Gs, three times the force of gravity for less than nine minutes. And at that time, you're going 17,500 miles an hour orbiting the Earth in 90 minutes.

But when the main engine cuts off after that, it was precisely eight minutes and 53 seconds, you're weightless. And that's the next big sensation. And that's combined with looking out the window and viewing the globe of the Earth. So, weightlessness and seeing the wonder of God's glory reflected in the creation that is our home, this planet in the middle of this amazing universe.

I mean, you could go on and on and on expressing the impressions that you get. What do the three Gs feel like for those nine minutes? Three Gs is not actually that bad if you're used to flying and especially military aircraft pulling Gs. But it's the duration that is pretty impressive. My later flights, my last three launches were on a Russian Soyuz and that was four Gs. It's more of a conventional rocket.

So, a little bit higher G loading. Again, it's not hard for a short period of time, but it's a long period of time, you know, almost nine minutes. Yeah. All right. Again, I'm listening, but I've not experienced any of that, so it's just fascinating to hear.

But these are the minor things. When you took off, you were already a committed Christian, is that correct? Yes, that's correct.

All right. You were with other astronauts, both in flight and then on the space stations. Did they come from different backgrounds or were they all believers? No, everybody came from many different backgrounds.

Not only backgrounds of vocation, if you will, but different countries. I think over those four flights, if you include the visiting crews, for example, I had four space shuttle crews visit the space station. And while I was there for a long expedition, I think I had 56 different individuals that I shared time with in space. So, and they all come from, I don't know, eight or nine different countries, I think. So, everybody's different, just like on Earth. Just like on Earth, there were a handful among those that were believers, but most of them were not.

All right. So, you had the reaction a believer would have of the immediate awe of God. The closest I can come to this is thinking back to seeing the Grand Canyon as an adult.

Yes. And all, to me, the only thing you can do is worship when you see it like, oh my, what a God. Now, this is something magnified in ways beyond what we can imagine. Did it have that kind of effect, even on those who were non-believers, or maybe someone came from a Russian atheist background? Was there any sense of awe, or made them wonder more about the universe? No, the degree of wonder, of course, you never know what's in people's minds unless they talk about it, and not everybody does. But yeah, everybody is just amazed with the experience, and amazed at the view of the Earth from that vantage point.

How it impacts people, it varies from person to person. And we know as believers that the evidence of God is obvious to everybody. It can't be denied, even though people deny it. But it's by the grace of God that He works in our hearts to actually come to see, and to understand, and to know who He is. Now, when you started taking pictures, was it initially just part of scientific mission, or was it always with a goal to documenting the creation of God? Yeah, early on, talking to folks that had been there before me, I grew to appreciate the fact that, especially on a short mission, which my first one was, ten days long, it was so intense that the ten days flies by, and pretty soon you're back on the ground and you look around and you say, what just happened? So you have so many impressions and new experiences and whatnot, so you're saturated, your senses are saturated. It's hard to accumulate the memory of that without photography. So I learned from my crewmates in the first flight, hey, take pictures, take pictures, take pictures, because then you've got to press, the memories are preserved. So I had that impressed on me in the first mission, and when I knew I was going for six months the first time, I knew it was going to be a unique experience, and very difficult to relate to. So I was motivated to capture the memories as much as I could, and also to capture the perspective from that vantage point of God's creative work and what is our habitation. The earth was designed to be inhabited, as Isaiah says, and I wanted to have the photography to be able to take people vicariously to that vantage point and consider those things that I experienced.

So that was really my motivation. Now we are assigned to do photography all the time, but that was a very, very small fraction of the photography that I did. And do you know how many total pictures that you took over your various missions?

When I got back from my last flight in 2016, the folks that track all that estimated nearly a half a million pictures over my flight. All right, so friends, we have the privilege of listening now to the human being, literally, who took more pictures of earth and outer space than any other human being on the planet, and he did it as a follower of Jesus. Again, the book, The Work of His Hands. And I literally, I just ordered it as a gift from my wife Nancy, because she's always fascinated by the universe and overwhelmed by it and how it points to God.

So we're just going to start unpacking this, and then after the break, we'll get into it more. But you say this in the description of your book, every shot contains lessons about God's creation. So just give us a hint of what some of these lessons are. Well, the obvious ones that jump out at you is when you consider what it takes for us to be able to live on earth. The air we breathe, you see the atmosphere in so many different unique ways up there, and you gain an appreciation of it. The water cycle, you see weather formations, you see bodies of water in the oceans and lakes and rivers and whatnot, and you see storms from above.

You see lightning rippling across continents at nighttime on the night side of the earth. So the water cycle is critical to our habitation. You see the provision that comes out of God's creative work in agriculture, in forests. So I was always trying to capture those elements just to show the fruit of God's creation that we are equipped and enabled to extract. Yeah, extraordinary. So we're going to dig into that further with my guest Jeffrey Williams on the other side of the break. That's what some astronomers have referred to as earth being the privileged planet for two reasons. One, because of the unique way that we have created that life can be sustained here, can be created and sustained.

And then two, that from a unique vantage point, we can observe the rest of the universe here, documented in photography, the name of the book, The Work of His Hands, by Jeffrey Williams. We'll be right back. Have you had a setback from an injury, accident or surgery that left you feeling weaker and a loss of strength? Or are you feeling the effects of aging and just don't feel like you have the stamina or energy you used to? Then MyoHealth might be an answer to your prayers. Backed by 24 human clinical studies and over $20 million in government funded research, MyoHealth contains a perfect balance of all nine essential amino acids. With MyoHealth, you can rebuild your strength, improve your balance and mobility, have more energy while restoring your health and vitality and start building new lean, stronger muscle in as little as 30 days. By combining MyoHealth with a healthy diet and regular exercise, you can feel stronger at any age, have more energy and live a life with vitality.

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It really works. Call 1-800-771-5584 or online at TriVita.com to place your order for products to support your wellness goals. As a TriVita introductory offer, use promo code BROWN25 and receive a 25% discount on the products of your choice. Call 1-800-771-5584. 800-771-5584. It's The Line of Fire with your host, Dr. Michael Brown. Get on The Line of Fire by calling 866-34 TRUTH.

Here again is Dr. Michael Brown. Thanks for joining us on The Line of Fire with my special guest, former NASA astronaut, the American male who spent more time in outer space than any other and the astronaut who took more pictures of outer space than any other in history. Sir, I've never even addressed this for more than two seconds on the air because it's so preposterous, but what do you think of when you hear people arguing that the Earth is flat? My answer is boiled down to two words, utter foolishness.

Yeah, enough said. I don't want to spend any more time on it. So you're at the space station six months at one point and during that time, what are you doing? What are you seeing? Is it the same thing over and over and over? Are you getting different?

What does the universe look like from out there compared to from down here? Well, we're very busy on the space station and I was there for six months, three times. In 2006, we were in the middle of building it, so a lot of the focus was on the assembly. Actually, I got there when the space shuttle was still grounded after the Columbia accident and we started flying the shuttle about halfway through that six-month stay and resumed the assembly of the space station.

Again, about halfway done with it. My next six-month flight in 2009 and 10, we finished the assembly. 2016, the last flight.

My fourth flight, it was in its full operational mode. It is a laboratory, so we're busy doing experiments across the spectrum of different science disciplines, a lot of experiments on ourselves. We're obviously running the space station, maintaining it, repairing things at break, whatnot, receiving supplies and whatnot, but the time in the window is seeing the Earth and so if your question is, what do you see, the variety, is it the same all the time? No, it's not the same, especially the Earth. Now, the deep heavens will stay largely the same. They don't change that much and you don't get to see a lot of the heavens except on the night side of the Earth when the stars are visible and it's not a whole lot different than it is, frankly, on the surface of the Earth if you go out to the mountains or somewhere away from city lights, but the Earth changes continually. Because of our orbit, we get to see the entire planet except for the poles and each spot over the Earth in different lighting conditions, day and night, and over weeks and months you watch the seasons go by and over the years you see changes of different types, development on the Earth and whatnot. So it is continually varying in what you can see and that's why I was so focused on trying to capture all of the variety that I could on the Earth. So you did the work of being there, all the years of preparation and the years of working towards this and actually being out of space for over a year and a half or roughly a year and a half.

Take all the pictures. Have you seen that people reading the book and looking at the pictures get a glimpse of what you felt and what you saw? I think so. I mean, people love to hear about it. People predominantly really appreciate the book. It's still largely unknown. It didn't get publicized very much, so people are still learning about it, but I wrote it in a way that I hoped would be timeless.

It wasn't going to be, you know, dependent upon some one-time event that happened. And because it's continued, even after all these years, it was published in 2010, people are still just as fascinated with it now as they were then. It just tells you that, yes, people are fascinated by all of these experiences and just trying to imagine what the experience would be like. Yeah, so after that time, so all these different times, six months in space, if you come back to Earth, how do you feel like, what does it feel like to be among other human beings in the busyness of this world?

And then we're on this planet, but we're so oblivious to what we're on because we've never had your perspective. Is it jarring for you? Is it jarring to this day? Is it jarring for you? Is it jarring to this day to be here on the Earth? How does it affect your overall perspective? No, I think I grew in appreciation for the little things in life, the enjoyment of family and friends, the things that we can enjoy on Earth that God has given us here for our enjoyment.

I also appreciate the stewardship of life, what Luther and others would call vocation, seeing life as a calling with a bigger purpose for the sake of Christ, to grow to appreciate your time and place in circumstance that God has created each of us and put you in that time and place and circumstance in life. So I think, among other things, you grow in a greater perspective beyond yourself. Yeah, I can only imagine. Could you see the rest of the solar system well from where you were or no? No, not any better than you would see, like I said, if you went out into the mountains with a telescope or whatnot. So it's not the best vantage point to look at the rest of the solar system. The Earth becomes the focus. And if someone said to you, well, what makes you so sure? You went already as a Christian, you were a believer in God, but what makes you so sure that the Earth is uniquely fashioned, that it was made, as you quoted from Isaiah, not to be uninhabited?

You mentioned a few things right before the break, but maybe unpack one or two that are the most extraordinary evidences of the handiwork of God and the creation of the Earth. Well, humanity's been obsessed for decades searching for life elsewhere. I think that's motivated by the presupposition that we're here by chance over time. We're here by chance, and certainly there's a chance it exists elsewhere.

So that's the motivation. But the fact is, and it's substantiated, obviously, like you said, from the Word of God, which I consider to be truth. That's where I start from, and I recognize my limit to understand it or to maybe interpret it, but it's presumed to be truth.

I just need to do the work to come to grips with what it is saying. And one of the things it says and affirms is that God created all things, and that as co-regents of His, He created humanity bearing His image, and basically relinquished the Earth to us, and designed it for our habitation. So with all of that in the Scripture, that's a presupposition for me, and everything else flows out of that. Now, when we look at it, when we consider it in detail, like I talked about before, the atmosphere of the water cycle, the vegetation, not the resources, the provision that comes out of the ground, and our ability to utilize it, to extract it, to subdue it, to have dominion over it, that just affirms the Scripture. So our experience, our observation affirms the Scripture. Bearing the image of God is a significant part of that understanding, of comprehending the answer to your question. One of the other things I talk about a lot lately, especially, is the mathematical order that is in God's creation, which is part of His provisioning. The chemical order, the physical order, the optical order, if your listeners are not scientists or mathematicians, think music, the order of that, and all of that order is comprehended because we bear the image of God, we enjoy it, it's pleasing to us, and we can make sense of it, and we can utilize it. And to me, that's the basic element of comprehending a biblical worldview of economics, of human civilization, of technology development, and all of that. And it's right there in Genesis 1. Yeah, and that answers the question that many would raise, well, why can't it just be random?

You've explained the impossibility of the randomness. It would just be like if the ocean, the tide comes in in the morning, and all of the refuse and junk from the ocean is washed up on the shore. I used to have a job before I went to college cleaning up a beach in the morning, and all this stuff would wash up. Well, for a five mile period, it was just quotations of Scripture, or headlines from the day from all the newspapers in a steady line. It's like, okay, that's not just refuse that washed in, but what you're saying is infinitely greater than any of that. And let me just say this, as a fellow believer, what really strikes me is when you start from the physical creation, as you did as this eyewitness, and then move it to us being created in the image of God, suddenly something goes on, the degree to which we're different. The fact that we can even observe, the fact that we can talk about the meaning of life, the fact that we can create music and enjoy it, and that's who we are. To the extent we grasp that, we thrive. And again, you bear unique witness to that, so I really do appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely true.

Absolutely. And of course, you see the purpose and the design and creation that you touched on, bearing that image. That's what really started science, as we grow to understand it. The age of science, the scientific revolution occurred because guys like Kepler and Newton and Boyle and many others were believers first, and they were theologians first, and their theology drove their science, and they were called in their vocation to be scientists, and that's how they were called to subdue God's creation.

And so it really came out of that biblical worldview, which is largely lost in the public today. But by God's grace, we'll be recovered, because the more we discover and learn, the harder it is to deny His reality. Hey friends, my guest Jeffrey Williams, we're indebted to him for doing what no other human being ever did.

You can check out his book, The Work of His Hands, his rich photographic work pointing to the reality of God and creation. Hey, thanks so much for joining us. Really appreciate who you are and what you've done. Thank you, Michael.

All right, God bless. Now we rise up. It's our resistance. You can't resist us. Another program powered by the Truth Network.