The Biologist Who Counted to One

In the late 1990s, when gray wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park, wildlife biologists fitted each animal with a radio collar and gave it a number. Wolf 9F — a breeding female in the Rose Creek Pack — became one of the most closely monitored animals in American conservation history.

When her signal went silent one January morning, biologist Mike Phillips didn't shrug and say, "We still have fifteen others transmitting fine." He drove snowmobiles into minus-twenty weather, flew aerial surveys, and hiked frozen ridgelines for days to locate her. She was one wolf out of hundreds in the park. She was also irreplaceable.

What drove that search was something beyond data collection. Each animal had a history, a specific role in the pack's survival. The loss of one changed the whole.

Jesus chose a shepherd — not a rancher managing livestock by the hundred — to explain how God searches for the lost. A shepherd in first-century Palestine knew every sheep's gait, every scar, every personality quirk. When one disappeared into the Judean hills, he didn't calculate the acceptable loss. He left the ninety-nine and went.

That is the arithmetic of divine love: one still matters when you have ninety-nine. The rejoicing in verse seven isn't relief that the numbers balanced out. It's the joy of a God who counts to one — and then counts again when you come home. Every person in this room is a number He would cross frozen ridgelines to find.