There's a moment in the Ascension story that I can't stop thinking about.
Jesus has just been lifted into the clouds. The disciples are standing on a hillside outside Bethany, mouths open, staring upward. And then two figures in white appear beside them and ask — with what I imagine is a fairly pointed tone — why are you standing around looking up at the sky?
It's almost funny. The most cosmically unprecedented event in human history just happened right in front of them, and the message is essentially: okay, now go live your life. The story isn't up there. The story is down here.
That moment is the thread I followed in this week's episode. Because I think we misread Ascension Day all the time. We focus on the departure — the leaving — and miss everything surrounding it. Forty days of patient preparation. A specific, guaranteed promise: you will receive power. And then that instruction to stop staring at the sky and get moving.
That is not a grief story. That is one of the most optimistic passages in the entire New Testament.
The Eyes of Your Heart
The reading from Ephesians this week stopped me cold. The author — writing from prison, by the way, which makes what he writes even more striking — prays that his readers would have "the eyes of their heart enlightened." That they would truly grasp the hope they've been called to.
That phrase has been sitting with me all week. Because it's not asking you to ignore reality or practice toxic positivity. It's asking you to see a deeper reality underneath the surface of things. To trust that something good is already in motion, even when the news cycle makes it impossible to feel.
Which is exactly the right frame for what I want to talk about next.
The Good News That Got Drowned Out
CBS News correspondent David Pogue spent 2025 quietly documenting breakthroughs that most people completely missed — not because they weren't real or significant, but because louder, more alarming headlines crowded them out. When I read through his roundup, I kept thinking about those disciples on the hillside. This is what it looks like to have enlightened eyes. To look at the same world everyone else is looking at and see something different.
Here's some of what he found.
Scientists have figured out how to make plastic from sugar cane instead of petroleum — and this material breaks down completely, leaving no microplastics behind. A company in Massachusetts is now producing it at industrial scale. The problem isn't solved, but the door is open in a way it simply wasn't before.
A Northwestern University professor named Eli Finkel co-created the Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement — a real institution whose entire purpose is teaching people to disagree better. Not louder. Not more effectively. More humanely. They use improv techniques to help people translate each other's anger into the underlying values driving it. Professor Finkel told CBS News he feels genuinely hopeful about what he's seeing in students.
And then there were the pop-up wetlands. California has lost around 90% of the wetlands migratory birds rely on as rest stops during their long seasonal journeys. The Nature Conservancy's solution: pay farmers to flood their fallow fields during migration season. Fifty thousand acres of temporary habitat, created from land that would otherwise sit empty — and the farmers benefit financially too. Someone just had to look at an empty flooded field and see possibility.
The Salmon Came Home
But the story that hit me hardest was the one about the Klamath River.
Four old dams had blocked salmon from reaching their spawning grounds for more than a century. The dams came down. And within days — not months, not seasons — the salmon returned. As if they had been waiting. As if something ancient in them remembered exactly where they were supposed to be.
A hundred years later. They remembered.
That's the image I keep returning to. Because that's what I think the Ascension story is actually about. Not the departure. The return. The deep, embedded, unkillable knowledge of where we're supposed to be going — and the promise that we will have the power to get there.
The angels didn't tell the disciples to give up hope. They told them to stop staring at the sky and get moving. The hope is real. The power is coming. But the work — and the wonder — is down here, on the ground, in the everyday.
Bad news breaks suddenly. Good news builds quietly, steadily, and it is absolutely everywhere — if you know how to look.
Listen to the full episode above, and subscribe to Monday to Sunday wherever you get your podcasts.