The exploration of the moon is something we haven't considered much lately. While most of our science fiction leads us to believe we might actually leave the Earth behind and live somewhere else in the future, nothing about our space exploration makes that look possible this side of heaven. But In The Shadow Of The Moon explores the men who strove to walk on the moon, some of whom succeeded and some who came incredibly close.

While I wasn't alive for the space missions (my most vivid space shuttle memory is of Challenger blowing up), I do have a well-kept paper from the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. There's a mystique there that's always been sort of, well, mystifying, and that doesn't go away (even when I'm watching the opening minutes of Jimmy Neutron as he's trying to leave Earth's atmosphere by the power of a toaster oven). And this movie, introduced by Ron Howard, allows BBC to take footage that most of us have never seen and made it good.

The extras allow us to see more than an hour of bonus footage, and throughout, you'll be surprised at how clearly the camera seems to innocently bring us face-to-face with the experiences of those astronauts. How cool would it be to be them? Well, it seems that In The Shadow Of The Moon really wanted to shine us onto what happened when they were in space, something we'll never experience. But the cool thing here is that the astronauts who are still alive (at least most of them) willingly shared of their stories.

The truth is that we all have some glorious awesome stories to tell, about love, life, and the way that God moves on our behalf. But we often don't share them, or we keep them locked away like precious footage and forget that it's part of our responsibility because we've had those experiences to share them with other people. The story of the moon is just like our story of God's movement in our lives: it's too good to keep wrapped up, something special not everyone can see for themselves, and yet it's so important that when other people hear it, they'll be blown away, too.