43. Sounds Like a History
Five historical episodes AIO should make.
By David Hilder | June 30, 2022
Five historical episodes AIO should make.
By David Hilder | June 30, 2022
You probably remember the episode with Paul Revere fiercely galloping on his midnight ride to warn of the British advance (Album 14). Or the one with Saint Patrick standing up to the druids of Ireland in a showdown of biblical proportions (Album 31). If you have the AIO Club, you’ll remember the episode with Irena Sendler risking her life to save Jews in Poland during the Holocaust (Season 4). Adventures in Odyssey’s history episodes are amazing. They tell the stories of heroes who have gone before us, men and women who put their faith into action in the midst of terrifying circumstances.
Recently, the episode The Christmas Bells (Album 70) tells the story of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who endured repeated tragedy in his life. It’s a powerful story and it points to the presence of God and the peace that he brings. There are so many true stories out there that deserve to be told, stories of hope and life and faith. And what better place for that than AIO? So let’s talk about some of those stories. I’ve put together a list of five historical events from the 20th century that stand out as exceptional and which I think would be a good fit for Adventures in Odyssey.
The Moon Landing
It was Christmas Eve, 1968. The astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission became the first humans to enter the moon’s orbit. As they gazed upon the moon’s cratered surface, closer than anyone had ever been before, the crew aboard the spacecraft transmitted a special television broadcast back to the people of Earth. The end of their broadcast, timed to coincide with lunar sunrise, began this way: “For all the people on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.” The crew then took turns reading from the opening of the book of Genesis, describing God’s creating of the heavens and the earth and his declaration “Let there be light.” They read the first ten verses of the Bible, ending with “and God saw that it was good. And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”
It turns out Christianity’s connection with the space program didn’t start in 2010 when astronaut and Adventures in Odyssey fan Terry Virts brought an AIO CD with him on a trip to the International Space Station. (Though that was very cool). NASA’s earliest voyages to the moon were already manned with astronauts awestruck by the glory of God’s creation. Interestingly, the Apollo 8 mission lasted about six days, the same time that God took to create the world.
When the moon landing finally came in 1969, the mission of Apollo 11 also took on a reverent, Christian tone. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin paused before stepping out on the moon’s surface with Neil Armstrong. Aldrin radioed home, saying, “I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.” It was then that Aldrin read from the Gospel of John and took communion.
It would be amazing to have an Adventures in Odyssey episode to commemorate this special moment. We can imagine how this would have gone differently if instead the atheistic regime of the Soviet Union had won the Space Race and made it to the moon. The moon landing was not just “a giant leap for mankind.” It was an acknowledgement that our God is that God of the universe, of all creation. And when we explore more of his creation, we discover a little bit more about how awesome and powerful he is. As Aldrin later said, “There are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”
The Singing Revolution
The Soviet Union, which also had a planned moon mission, was unable to match America’s successes in the space race. But they had other concerns to deal with, namely keeping their people in check. And not just the people of Russia. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and many others were all part of the USSR. The atheistic regime did not look too kindly on Christianity, or nonconformism in general. After fifty years, this all changed with a song.
In May 1988, as Adventures in Odyssey was airing its 28th episode, The Price of Freedom, a fight for freedom began afresh in Estonia. The Soviets censored songs which did not praise the tenets of communism. Suddenly the Estonian people, organized together for a festival, erupted into patriotic songs, including the Estonian national anthem that had been banned for so long. Mass singing protests quickly spread across the Baltic states. People joined hands and formed an unbroken human chain of two million people which stretched across the landscape and connected the capital cities of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
It's hard to believe this is a true story, but it is. It’s an amazing moment in very recent history that more people should know about. Now, could such as story be controversial? Perhaps to listeners in Russia? Possibly. According to page 493 of the 2012 Official Guide, the episode Something Significant (Album 49), which features stories related to the song “Jesus Loves Me”, was originally supposed to feature a segment “set in a communist country”. The producers feared this would offend people living in that country, so the segment was removed. (It’s possible that country was China, where Chinese Christians used a phrase from “Jesus Loves Me” to communicate without being detected). While I understand the desire not to offend, a powerful story should take precedence. A story like this can be told with tact, while still communicating the truth of these events.
The singing demonstrations lasted for years. The Soviets tried to put a stop to the patriotic singing with a show of violent force, but failed. The people continued their singing even as Soviet tanks approached to challenge them. By the end of 1991 Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had successfully become independent nations and the Soviet Union was no more.
The English translation of the end of Estonia’s national anthem goes like this:
May God in Heaven thee defend,
My own beloved land!
May He be guard, may He be shield,
For ever bless and guardian wield
Protection for all deeds of thine,
My own, my dearest land!
Johnny Cash
The power of song was on full display during the career of American icon Johnny Cash. His hits of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, “Ring of Fire”, “I Walk the Line”, “Folsom Prison Blues”, and many more are popular to this day. Cash’s life was complicated. After being serving in the U.S. Air Force, Cash returned to America to pursue music. As he became more successful, the high life of being a celebrity led Cash to drug and alcohol addiction. His escapades included various arrests and nights in jail, attempted bribery, the breakdown of his marriage, as well as an episode where he was involved in accidentally starting a forest fire.
Now, an Adventures in Odyssey episode wouldn’t have to go into all the details about Johnny Cash’s pitfalls. You can already watch that in the 2005 movie Walk the Line. But what AIO could do is highlight what the movie skipped over. The filmmakers unfortunately seemed keen to cut out Cash’s faith journey. Speaking about the lowest point in his life, Cash later said, “I never wanted to see another dawn. I had wasted my life. I had drifted so far away from God and every stabilising force in my life that I felt there was no hope for me.” And so he carried out his plan: he was going to enter a network of caves, get lost, and never find his way out.
But God was not done with Johnny Cash. In the quiet and total darkness of the caves, Cash thought of God. He felt God’s presence and a feeling of peace. Though he was lost, he felt the urge to get up and keep moving. Finally, he felt a breeze and followed it out into the sunshine. He said, “I hadn't prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn't stopped God from intervening.”
Cash’s lowest point reminds me of Dr. Regis Blackgaard. At the end of his life, Blackgaard also sought refuge in an underground passage. He was without hope and sought death rather than turning to God. Cash’s story is a lovely echo of that event. Only in this case Cash responded to God’s call.
Cash became a Christian and went out to sing gospel songs such as “The Far Side Banks of Jordan”, “He Turned Water Into Wine” and “Jesus Was a Carpenter”. He completed a degree in theology, became a minister, and played music at Billy Graham’s events. He produced an audio recording of the entire New Testament, created a film about Jesus in Israel, and wrote a novel about the Apostle Paul. This untold story about Johnny Cash’s turn to Christ could be a great opportunity for Adventures in Odyssey to step in. AIO seems to have a proclivity for exploring the turbulent lives of hymn writers, which is made easier by the fact that many hymns are in the public domain. The music of Johnny Cash is not and it might be very complicated to get the rights. This is undoubtedly the biggest hurdle in telling Cash’s story. Nevertheless, it is a story worth telling.
Martin Luther King
Another American figure who rose to prominence in the 1950s and 60s was Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., champion of the Civil Rights Movement. To protest segregation, he led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, spurred on by the famous incident with Rosa Parks. He advocated for change not through violent protests, but through nonviolent demonstrations. We’ve heard episodes on slavery and racial discrimination before, but only in stories involving the distant past. This is an era of more recent American history that Adventures in Odyssey has yet to tackle.
King became friends with Billy Graham, who refused to have segregated rallies where African-Americans were kept separate. King said, “Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been.” Despite his nonviolence, King’s home was targeted with bombing, and he was arrested and jailed. After one protest he was arrested and sentenced to four months hard labor in a maximum-security prison. He would eventually be assassinated in 1968. But his work helped to end segregation in the southern states and inspired Civil Rights movements around the world.
What some people forget is that King was a Baptist minister, inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus. King’s rhetoric was filled with biblical imagery from both the Old and New Testaments. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he said, “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
While you might call Billy Graham America’s pastor, Martin Luther King was like America’s prophet, calling the nation to account and asking it to live up to its creed. He believed in America’s founding vision and trusted in God to bring it about. King ended his famous speech will a call to “join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
D-Day
The cause of freedom is a battle worth fighting. No other conflict in recent memory could make this fact clearer than World War II. Traditionally AIO episodes about WWII have focused on the Pacific theater, which makes sense because this was the arena in which Mr. Whittaker fought. We’ve heard about Pearl Harbor and numerous other battles with the Japanese in those episodes. But there was a whole other part of the war raging in Europe too. More recently, the club episode One More Name featured the heroic attempts of Irena Sendler to rescue Jews from the Holocaust in Poland. And there are plenty more WWII stories to tell.
There are events in history that seem inevitable after the fact. But in reality, they could have turned out very differently. Operation Overlord, or D-Day, is one of those events. Two years earlier, the Allies had attempted a similar but smaller operation known as the Dieppe Raid. Their forces landed in northern France and attempted to capture the port of Dieppe. But it proved to be a disaster. The Allied tanks got stuck on the pebbly beach and the Royal Air Force was trounced. The charging infantry received little support. A majority of the men were killed, wounded, or captured, while the Germans had few losses.
D-Day required several miracles to succeed, including the weather. On the evening of June 4, 1944, General Eisenhower took a look at the stormy weather and concluded that D-Day could not be carried out the following day as planned. It was postponed to June 6, when it was predicted that the weather would be improve for a short window, before worsening again. Major storms did in fact follow after the D-Day landings, once the objective had been achieved. Because the Germans were aware of the incoming bad weather, they were not expecting an invasion. Later, Eisenhower said, “If there were nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next 24 hours did it.”
D-Day was the largest amphibious assault ever attempted. The operation involved five thousand ships, 150,000 men, and 30,000 vehicles. The Allied troops arrived on beaches riddled with barbed wire, landmines, and barricades. German pill boxes targeted them as soon as they came into view. Many troops who parachuted in missed their drop zone and most of the equipment parachuted in was lost.
As the troops were landing on the beaches and pushing farther inland, President Roosevelt gave a radio broadcast in which he prayed for the operation. His prayer began this way: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.” That prayer, joined by listeners on the radio across the country, was answered.
There are so many lessons that history can teach us. If you want to learn about military strategy or protesting tactics, history is the place to go. But what I have found most valuable about history is the stories of faith that we find there—the faith of ordinary people swept up in amazing circumstances. They can be such an encouragement to us all. And I believe these stories in particular would be a great encouragement to Adventures in Odyssey fans everywhere.
Recently, the episode The Christmas Bells (Album 70) tells the story of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who endured repeated tragedy in his life. It’s a powerful story and it points to the presence of God and the peace that he brings. There are so many true stories out there that deserve to be told, stories of hope and life and faith. And what better place for that than AIO? So let’s talk about some of those stories. I’ve put together a list of five historical events from the 20th century that stand out as exceptional and which I think would be a good fit for Adventures in Odyssey.
The Moon Landing
It was Christmas Eve, 1968. The astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission became the first humans to enter the moon’s orbit. As they gazed upon the moon’s cratered surface, closer than anyone had ever been before, the crew aboard the spacecraft transmitted a special television broadcast back to the people of Earth. The end of their broadcast, timed to coincide with lunar sunrise, began this way: “For all the people on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.” The crew then took turns reading from the opening of the book of Genesis, describing God’s creating of the heavens and the earth and his declaration “Let there be light.” They read the first ten verses of the Bible, ending with “and God saw that it was good. And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you – all of you on the good Earth.”
It turns out Christianity’s connection with the space program didn’t start in 2010 when astronaut and Adventures in Odyssey fan Terry Virts brought an AIO CD with him on a trip to the International Space Station. (Though that was very cool). NASA’s earliest voyages to the moon were already manned with astronauts awestruck by the glory of God’s creation. Interestingly, the Apollo 8 mission lasted about six days, the same time that God took to create the world.
When the moon landing finally came in 1969, the mission of Apollo 11 also took on a reverent, Christian tone. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin paused before stepping out on the moon’s surface with Neil Armstrong. Aldrin radioed home, saying, “I would like to request a few moments of silence. I would like to invite each person listening in, wherever and whomever he may be, to contemplate for a moment the events of the past few hours and to give thanks in his own individual way.” It was then that Aldrin read from the Gospel of John and took communion.
It would be amazing to have an Adventures in Odyssey episode to commemorate this special moment. We can imagine how this would have gone differently if instead the atheistic regime of the Soviet Union had won the Space Race and made it to the moon. The moon landing was not just “a giant leap for mankind.” It was an acknowledgement that our God is that God of the universe, of all creation. And when we explore more of his creation, we discover a little bit more about how awesome and powerful he is. As Aldrin later said, “There are many of us in the NASA program who do trust that what we are doing is part of God’s eternal plan for man.”
The Singing Revolution
The Soviet Union, which also had a planned moon mission, was unable to match America’s successes in the space race. But they had other concerns to deal with, namely keeping their people in check. And not just the people of Russia. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and many others were all part of the USSR. The atheistic regime did not look too kindly on Christianity, or nonconformism in general. After fifty years, this all changed with a song.
In May 1988, as Adventures in Odyssey was airing its 28th episode, The Price of Freedom, a fight for freedom began afresh in Estonia. The Soviets censored songs which did not praise the tenets of communism. Suddenly the Estonian people, organized together for a festival, erupted into patriotic songs, including the Estonian national anthem that had been banned for so long. Mass singing protests quickly spread across the Baltic states. People joined hands and formed an unbroken human chain of two million people which stretched across the landscape and connected the capital cities of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
It's hard to believe this is a true story, but it is. It’s an amazing moment in very recent history that more people should know about. Now, could such as story be controversial? Perhaps to listeners in Russia? Possibly. According to page 493 of the 2012 Official Guide, the episode Something Significant (Album 49), which features stories related to the song “Jesus Loves Me”, was originally supposed to feature a segment “set in a communist country”. The producers feared this would offend people living in that country, so the segment was removed. (It’s possible that country was China, where Chinese Christians used a phrase from “Jesus Loves Me” to communicate without being detected). While I understand the desire not to offend, a powerful story should take precedence. A story like this can be told with tact, while still communicating the truth of these events.
The singing demonstrations lasted for years. The Soviets tried to put a stop to the patriotic singing with a show of violent force, but failed. The people continued their singing even as Soviet tanks approached to challenge them. By the end of 1991 Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had successfully become independent nations and the Soviet Union was no more.
The English translation of the end of Estonia’s national anthem goes like this:
May God in Heaven thee defend,
My own beloved land!
May He be guard, may He be shield,
For ever bless and guardian wield
Protection for all deeds of thine,
My own, my dearest land!
Johnny Cash
The power of song was on full display during the career of American icon Johnny Cash. His hits of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, “Ring of Fire”, “I Walk the Line”, “Folsom Prison Blues”, and many more are popular to this day. Cash’s life was complicated. After being serving in the U.S. Air Force, Cash returned to America to pursue music. As he became more successful, the high life of being a celebrity led Cash to drug and alcohol addiction. His escapades included various arrests and nights in jail, attempted bribery, the breakdown of his marriage, as well as an episode where he was involved in accidentally starting a forest fire.
Now, an Adventures in Odyssey episode wouldn’t have to go into all the details about Johnny Cash’s pitfalls. You can already watch that in the 2005 movie Walk the Line. But what AIO could do is highlight what the movie skipped over. The filmmakers unfortunately seemed keen to cut out Cash’s faith journey. Speaking about the lowest point in his life, Cash later said, “I never wanted to see another dawn. I had wasted my life. I had drifted so far away from God and every stabilising force in my life that I felt there was no hope for me.” And so he carried out his plan: he was going to enter a network of caves, get lost, and never find his way out.
But God was not done with Johnny Cash. In the quiet and total darkness of the caves, Cash thought of God. He felt God’s presence and a feeling of peace. Though he was lost, he felt the urge to get up and keep moving. Finally, he felt a breeze and followed it out into the sunshine. He said, “I hadn't prayed over my decision to seek death in the cave, but that hadn't stopped God from intervening.”
Cash’s lowest point reminds me of Dr. Regis Blackgaard. At the end of his life, Blackgaard also sought refuge in an underground passage. He was without hope and sought death rather than turning to God. Cash’s story is a lovely echo of that event. Only in this case Cash responded to God’s call.
Cash became a Christian and went out to sing gospel songs such as “The Far Side Banks of Jordan”, “He Turned Water Into Wine” and “Jesus Was a Carpenter”. He completed a degree in theology, became a minister, and played music at Billy Graham’s events. He produced an audio recording of the entire New Testament, created a film about Jesus in Israel, and wrote a novel about the Apostle Paul. This untold story about Johnny Cash’s turn to Christ could be a great opportunity for Adventures in Odyssey to step in. AIO seems to have a proclivity for exploring the turbulent lives of hymn writers, which is made easier by the fact that many hymns are in the public domain. The music of Johnny Cash is not and it might be very complicated to get the rights. This is undoubtedly the biggest hurdle in telling Cash’s story. Nevertheless, it is a story worth telling.
Martin Luther King
Another American figure who rose to prominence in the 1950s and 60s was Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., champion of the Civil Rights Movement. To protest segregation, he led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, spurred on by the famous incident with Rosa Parks. He advocated for change not through violent protests, but through nonviolent demonstrations. We’ve heard episodes on slavery and racial discrimination before, but only in stories involving the distant past. This is an era of more recent American history that Adventures in Odyssey has yet to tackle.
King became friends with Billy Graham, who refused to have segregated rallies where African-Americans were kept separate. King said, “Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been.” Despite his nonviolence, King’s home was targeted with bombing, and he was arrested and jailed. After one protest he was arrested and sentenced to four months hard labor in a maximum-security prison. He would eventually be assassinated in 1968. But his work helped to end segregation in the southern states and inspired Civil Rights movements around the world.
What some people forget is that King was a Baptist minister, inspired by the life and teachings of Jesus. King’s rhetoric was filled with biblical imagery from both the Old and New Testaments. In his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he said, “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”
While you might call Billy Graham America’s pastor, Martin Luther King was like America’s prophet, calling the nation to account and asking it to live up to its creed. He believed in America’s founding vision and trusted in God to bring it about. King ended his famous speech will a call to “join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”
D-Day
The cause of freedom is a battle worth fighting. No other conflict in recent memory could make this fact clearer than World War II. Traditionally AIO episodes about WWII have focused on the Pacific theater, which makes sense because this was the arena in which Mr. Whittaker fought. We’ve heard about Pearl Harbor and numerous other battles with the Japanese in those episodes. But there was a whole other part of the war raging in Europe too. More recently, the club episode One More Name featured the heroic attempts of Irena Sendler to rescue Jews from the Holocaust in Poland. And there are plenty more WWII stories to tell.
There are events in history that seem inevitable after the fact. But in reality, they could have turned out very differently. Operation Overlord, or D-Day, is one of those events. Two years earlier, the Allies had attempted a similar but smaller operation known as the Dieppe Raid. Their forces landed in northern France and attempted to capture the port of Dieppe. But it proved to be a disaster. The Allied tanks got stuck on the pebbly beach and the Royal Air Force was trounced. The charging infantry received little support. A majority of the men were killed, wounded, or captured, while the Germans had few losses.
D-Day required several miracles to succeed, including the weather. On the evening of June 4, 1944, General Eisenhower took a look at the stormy weather and concluded that D-Day could not be carried out the following day as planned. It was postponed to June 6, when it was predicted that the weather would be improve for a short window, before worsening again. Major storms did in fact follow after the D-Day landings, once the objective had been achieved. Because the Germans were aware of the incoming bad weather, they were not expecting an invasion. Later, Eisenhower said, “If there were nothing else in my life to prove the existence of an almighty and merciful God, the events of the next 24 hours did it.”
D-Day was the largest amphibious assault ever attempted. The operation involved five thousand ships, 150,000 men, and 30,000 vehicles. The Allied troops arrived on beaches riddled with barbed wire, landmines, and barricades. German pill boxes targeted them as soon as they came into view. Many troops who parachuted in missed their drop zone and most of the equipment parachuted in was lost.
As the troops were landing on the beaches and pushing farther inland, President Roosevelt gave a radio broadcast in which he prayed for the operation. His prayer began this way: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.” That prayer, joined by listeners on the radio across the country, was answered.
There are so many lessons that history can teach us. If you want to learn about military strategy or protesting tactics, history is the place to go. But what I have found most valuable about history is the stories of faith that we find there—the faith of ordinary people swept up in amazing circumstances. They can be such an encouragement to us all. And I believe these stories in particular would be a great encouragement to Adventures in Odyssey fans everywhere.
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