Considering the Moon

My wife and I love moonrise at the beach, especially when it’s a full moon. We take our spot in the sand, sometimes with a few friends and some wine, and look over the surf to the horizon, waiting expectantly.  On a night when it is crisp and clear, the place where it always seems to rise will brighten, and then the luminescent edge of the moon will suddenly appear, only to grow into a huge, pale, yellow ball in a matter of minutes, standing momentarily on the dark ocean before it continues its ascent into the sky.

Lunar “Misses”

On March 3, 2026, the first total lunar eclipse of the year occurred, and the so-called “blood moon” was the last one visible from North America until New Year’s Eve 2028.  Little good it did me, though. I went outside to see it between 6-7 am but a dense fog covered our beach town so that no celestial bodies were visible, let alone the moon.

It reminded me of another lunar “miss” in 2018 that was more due to my miscalculation. That year, we had the rarest of moon events, what CNET called “a trifecta of lunar awesomeness”[1]. Not since March 31, 1866, did we have a Super Blue Blood Moon, when the moon is at the closest point in its orbit to us (a mere 223,000 miles away), appearing super large. It was also the second full moon of the month (thus, “blue”) and turned a (blood) red hue as it traveled through the earth’s shadow in a total lunar eclipse.  We planned then to have a couple friends over to watch the once-in-a-lifetime confluence of lunar events.

But I miscalculated, noticing the moon was already up and above the dunes as I drove home during daylight hours.  Then I read that we on the east coast mostly missed the eclipse since it was scheduled to be visible here only as the moon set, dipping below the western horizon.  While we gathered anyway around the fire pit and stared for a couple hours at a magnificent full moon in a perfectly clear sky, I felt a momentary tinge of disappointment because we missed out on two of the three events that made this moon very rare due to the quirk of living in the Eastern Time zone.

 

Beyond the Moon

The disappointment of missing these rare lunar events dissolves when I ponder a thought expressed so beautifully in the ancient words of the shepherd/psalmist David:

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them? (Psalm 8:3-4)

What, indeed?  Yet the One who made the vast heavens and set the moon on its predictable course is mindful of us and does care.  And because of his great love for us, the Bible states, God has saved us by his grace (Ephesians 2:4-5).  That is a truth which fills me with wonder and gratitude whenever I think about it, even once in a blue moon.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/how-to/blue-moon-2018-how-to-see/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g