Love You To The Moon And Back

This is a phrase you often hear nowadays  - between couples, between children and their parents...it appears on greetings cards, coffee mugs, and is the title of a children's book [pub 2015] 
Many people will first have encountered the expression in Sam McBratney's book [pub 1994] "Guess how much I love you?"

As far as I can tell, the expression 'to the moon and back' has been around for decades - and NASA used it in the 1960s to describe their space program. The first use of a similar phrase incorporating 'love' seems to be in a play called "Nuts" from 1979 by US Playwright Tom Toper.

"When I was a little girl, I used to say to her, ‘I love you to the moon and down again and around the world and back again.’ And she used to say to me, ‘I love you to the sun and down again and around the stars and back again.’”
It started appearing on twitter about 10 years ago, and in 2014 Dolly Parton released a song entitled To The Moon And Back.
There will be loads of stuff in the media this weekend about it being half a century since the first moon-landing. And rightly so - it was an amazing achievement. 
I remember on the Sunday evening, after church, the youth group went to someone's home for coffee and chat - and we all stood out in the back garden and looked up and wondered. The next day [my Mum's 45th birthday] we heard that it had happened - two men had walked on the moon. 
Friends, I have to tell you that I too went to the moon and back the other Friday evening! There was a moon landing in Dorset!
The Dorset Moon Experience came to Bournemouth

Click on the link above to read more -but we visited this amazing inflatable lunar recreation in St Peter's Church one warm Friday evening.
Each centimetre of the internally lit sphere represents 5km of the lunar surface, a scale of 1:500,000. The free exhibition is travelling round the world [Northern Ireland next week, Mags!]
It was quite spectacular to see it shining brightly, suspended at the far end of the nave, as we walked into the church. Awesome...
As you can imagine, there were a lot of people taking photographs! Holding up the moon seemed to be one of the most popular pose.
And in case you are wondering, this is what the darkl side of the moon looks like...

As King David said in Psalm 8-
When I look at the sky, which you have made, at the moon and the stars, which you set in their places—what are human beings, that you think of them?