January 28, 1986
It was the "December 7, 1941" or the "November 22, 1963" or the "September 11, 2001" for my generation.
I did not remember what day of the week that it was. I had to find it. That just goes to show what an ordinary, nothing-special kind of day that it was. (It was a Tuesday, by the way.) I may not remember the day of the week, but I remember the exact moment that I heard the news.
It was the last semester of my Senior Year at West Orange-Stark High School in Orange, Texas, and I was sitting in Mrs. Gans' 3rd Period Geometry class at about 11:00 a.m. One of our Assistant Principals, Lenny Dauphine, came over the loud speaker and announced that the "Space Shuttle Challenger has exploded shortly after lift-off."
"Exploded." It was such a dramatic word. I remember thinking, "It can't be THAT bad. Maybe the booster rockets 'exploded,' but the Shuttle?! Nah."
After class finished, several of us went into Mr. Wills' classroom. He was my Physics teacher and he had a TV in his classroom. I stood there with some of my friends and classmates and saw the video for the first time. What I saw was an "explosion." I remember clearly one of my female classmates shrieking in horror and running out of the room. She understood what I still could not fathom: that there was no way that the seven astronauts on board could have survived. Even more poignant was the fact that Christa McAuliffe, a school teacher from New Hampshire who was selected from 11,000 applicants, was on board that day. She was not an astronaut. She was "one of us."
We stood there in shocked silence watching them replay the video over and over and over again. Most of us, including me, did not even know that a shuttle was going up that day. Since the first one had gone up in 1981, shuttle launches had become routine and mundane. We were all reminded that day that there is nothing "routine" or "mundane" about space travel.
I find myself wondering today, on the 30th anniversary of the Challenger Disaster, why it is that we mark our lives by tragic events. My grandfather remembered exactly where he was when Pearl Harbor was attacked. My dad remembers where he was John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. My teenage nieces remember where they were when the World Trade Center Towers fell in New York. Elders, Boomers, Gen-Xers, and Millenials alike. We all remember "where we were" when something awful happened.
I am not certain, but I have an idea about why this is. Senseless, unexpected tragedy causes us to stop and think about how fragile human life really is. Whether the death is the result of a planned group attack or a lone gunman (moral evil) or caused by a massive hurricane slamming into the Gulf Coast (natural evil), these events make us think to ourselves, "Wow. If the circumstances had been just a little bit different, that could have been me." These events make us stop and take a long, hard look at the reality that we are "just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away," as James 4:14 reminds us. They make us think about what we have and have not done, and what we need to do before our "vapor" vanishes.
But I am also thinking today, on this day that a tragic event marked my generation, that as a follower of Jesus Christ, my life has been marked by another tragic event: the death of God's Son on a cross. There were no cameras rolling and no reporters present when that happened. Just a few family members and close friends weeping as they watched their son, brother, and friend die slowly and painfully. As a believer in Jesus, I have been changed forever by a tragedy.
Things change after a tragedy. Pearl Harbor pushed the U.S. into World War II. JFK's death changed the direction of national policy towards the USSR and Southeast Asia. The Challenger disaster changed manned spaceflight, even though NASA would live through another disaster in 2003 with the Space Shuttle Columbia. 9/11 drastically changed how we travel and view terrorism in the world.
Things change after a tragedy. And today, as I remember the awful events of January 28, 1986, I also give thanks for the awful events that occurred on Passover weekend sometime around 29 AD. The Challenger exploding changed my life, but the Cross changed my eternity.
