From Six Billion to Six

About two years ago I finally gave in to the lure of online social networking, otherwise known as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Now, I'm not exactly all that old, but I had always thought of these sites as catering to a younger generation; high school and college age mostly. I had no thoughts of becoming part of the phenomenon; that is until I wanted to download music to a song by a favorite band of mine. I went to their site like I had done so many times before only to find that the content I was looking for had been moved to their new MySpace site. Not wanting to give up my endeavor, I set up a quick account expecting only to use it for this express purpose. But as I navigated around a little bit, I found that many of my friends and family were signed up as well. I was amazed at the diversity of membership and I ended up finding people whom I hadn't seen or spoken to in years. A year or so after creating this account, I added an account at another of these sites, Facebook. And that brings me to want I want to share with you.

If you've ever been on Facebook (and if you're reading this on Facebook right now, yes I do realize that's a stupid question), you know that invitations to join groups are pretty common. And few groups on Facebook may be more popular than the group "Six Degrees of Separation." It's based on the theory that everyone in the world is no more than six "steps" away from any other person. I've yet to join the group myself, but it did remind me of an episode of Primetime I saw a couple of years ago.

I don't normally watch the primetime news programs, but this one was about the six degrees theory, and I've always been a bit fascinated by that so I decided to watch. The premise of the show was that they would take two complete strangers in New York City and see if they could connect in six steps or less. The one I remember paired an opera singer and a boxer; two polar opposites from opposite sides of the tracks who couldn't possibly run in the same circles, being asked to find each other in one of the largest cities on earth by no other means than mutual acquaintances. Fascinating, I thought. But there was no way she would do it.

To start the show, they took the opera singer and gave her nothing but the boxer's name, profession and photo. From there they followed her as she tried to find someone she knew who would know someone that would know someone that would know someone else, etc, until they found someone who knew this boxer personally. And she had only six steps to do it in. If I'm not mistaken, she did it in four. Unbelievable.

As I lay in bed later that night, I couldn't get the show out of my head. I kept thinking about all the people I know, and all the people they know and so on and so on until my brain began to hurt. But then another thought occurred to me. God calls us to take His word to all the nations, and if you're anything like me, that task seems awfully daunting. I've only occasionally been out of Mansfield, Ohio much less into all the nations. And how many people are there in the world now, six billion plus? Incredible. How can we possibly expect reach all of those people? But think about it for a minute. If each of us is only, on average, six steps away from everyone else in the world, then theoretically, if we tell only the people we know about Jesus and they in turn tell the people they know and so on, the whole world could know of the One true and living God in only six steps. Doesn't seem quite so daunting anymore does it? From six billion to six.

Lest you think I'm completely crazy, let me give you a quick mathmatical example. Going back to Facebook, I think I currently have a bit over 200 "friends." Some people have far fewer and some have many, many more than that. Regardless of the number, it usually doesn't begin to exemplify the true number of people we really know. I'm sure I could easily double or triple that number and more by just thinking of every person I ever encountered at every school, job, church or organization I've ever been a part of. But let's take the number 200 for arguments sake.

Step one is the 200 people I know. Assuming they each know 200 more unique individuals, step two gives you 40,000. If we continue to carry that out, making the assumption that every person will know 200 unique other people then step three gives you 8 million, step four takes you to 1.6 billion, step five makes 320 billion, and by the time you reach step six, you're at 64 trillion people, which, if I'm not mistaken, is roughly one thousand times the earth's current population.

I guess my point in all of this is that we really can make a difference. And we can't shy away from telling the people we come in contact with about Jesus. Who knows what effect it will have? Who knows how far the impact of each person you tell about God will reach. Look at all of the pastors, authors, musicians, filmmakers, etc. who are doing great things for God. They are having a far reaching impact, but along the way, someone had to be the one to tell them about God.

I think back to when I was in a band during and right after High School. One thing we always said was that if all of our time together as a band ended up being for the purpose of reaching just one single person, then it would have all been worth it. I don't know if we ever really did reach anyone, but I remember playing for the youth night at a local Church. I only vaguely remember the song, and I have no idea now who this person was, but a girl came up afterwards with tears still in her eyes and told us how much one song had impacted her. Like I said, I have no idea who she was, but I've thought a lot about that moment over the years. I wonder what became of the conviction she experienced that night. I wonder how many other people she may have in turn touched. The point is we just don't know. The person you tell about Jesus may laugh at you. They may want nothing to do with you. But they might also respond. And they might tell another person, or 100 people, or 1,000 people. You just don't know.

There's a song that comes to mind by the band Casting Crowns. One of the lines is "Jesus paid much too high a price for us to pick and choose who should come." Is that what we're doing? Deciding for ourselves who we will tell? Deciding who we think will respond and who won't? Waiting for just that right opportunity to tell someone when we think they will be most responsive? Or are we telling everyone, at every opportunity we get? Realizing that we could be just six small steps away from reaching them all.