I don’t suppose the name Edward Lorenz or the fraction .506127 has any meaning to anyone reading this.
Lorenz was one of the earlier computer nerds and, in 1961, he developed a much more accurate logarithm for predicting where Atlantic storms, hurricanes, would strike America’s East Coast. One of the factors used in his formula was the fraction .506127.
Like any good scientist, Lorenz ran his model many times to be sure he got the same results every time but on one occasion he accidentally left off the last two digits of the fraction. Any mathematician would tell us that those last two digits are practically meaningless.
To Lorenz’s shock, the small change resulted in an error of hundreds of miles of difference in where a storm would strike.
He later wrote a book titled “The Butterfly Effect”. The basic premise was that a butterfly flapping its wings caused a larger reaction from a bug that startled a large animal, and a series of larger and larger events took place until the flapping of the butterfly’s wings ended up causing a tornado.
I remind myself often that what we are doing at the Monday night ministry is not unlike that butterfly. We may be only causing a small change in an inmate, but the long-term effects could be huge. He may well accept Christ as Savior on a given Monday night and, upon release, share God’s word with family and friends who would not hear the message of salvation any other way.