"Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?" (Luke 15:4)
Let me share with you another lesson from the strange world of theoretical physics. As I mentioned in an earlier Newsletter, my son Nathan is a budding physicist. Over the summer he has been employed (by a student internship program) at CERN Laboratories, in Geneva – among the world’s premier nuclear research facilities. We talk physics around our dinner table these days.
CERN Laboratories are absolutely immense: a particle accelerator 27 kilometers in circumference constructed in rock 100 meters below ground; hundreds of world-class scientists (and a handful of wide-eyed interns); and billions of dollars making the facility go.
The entire project, as I understand, is looking for something called the "Higgs Boson." Apparently the universe is full of them…theoretically. But no one has yet managed to document their existence. Atoms are old-hat, these days. Protons and electrons – what I remember from high school physics – are purely passe. It is leptons, mesons, and bosons that we are after: twelve basic particles that make up everything – from protons to potatoes. Eleven of them have been detected experimentally; only the Higgs particle eludes us. One lonely particle. It represents the final frontier.
Our world is filled with lonely particles just waiting for detection. My daughter Ruth and my son Joel worked with stray particles this summer, too. Ruth worked at Wilderness Canoe Base – a Christian camping ministry in northern Minnesota focusing traditionally on outreach to kids from the city. Joel worked at Ox Lake Bible Camp – an "international village" camping ministry near Amery, Wisconsin. Their summers, too, were filled with "stray particles": kids from broken homes yearning for stability; young people from affluent suburbia aching for significance; kids from the inner city eager, maybe, for simple fresh air and an unobstructed horizon. Many of these kids know nothing about Jesus, really. They are undetected, for the most part, by church and outreach programs. We know they must exist theoretically. But we don’t "see" them; they don’t show up on our instruments.
Then we need better instruments. In our churches and board rooms and prayer groups, we need to invest our brightest minds and best efforts in the task of "particle detection." We need to learn where the lost ones are, what they are like, what languages they speak, and how they may be reached. We need to invest our resources and our prayers. We need, perhaps, to give our children to the effort – or maybe to give ourselves.
One point six billion people remain unevangelized. Of these, 334 million live in heavily closed "creative access" countries. Do you see them? This is the final frontier.
"The Way I See It", November 2001