The kingdom of heaven operates on arithmetic that makes no earthly sense.
Where we see percentages, God sees persons. Where we calculate acceptable loss, He commits to reckless rescue. This story has been softened into a children’s bedtime tale, but its original telling was an economic scandal—a revelation of love that violates every principle of prudent management.
Ninety-nine percent success rate? Any shepherd would celebrate. Any CEO would take that to the board.
Any institution would call it a win.
But God leaves the ninety-nine to search for the one.
Read it slowly. And when you reach the end, ask yourself: which number are you in this equation?
LOST SHEEP
A shepherd had a hundred sheep.
He did not love them as a flock, as a mass of wool and bleating, as numbers in a count. He loved them as a hundred singular souls, each known to him by name and gait and the particular way they turned their heads when he called.
He knew the one with the crooked leg that had healed badly after a fall. He knew the one that always grazed at the edge of the fold, drawn to the wildness beyond. He knew the one whose mother had died in birthing, the one he had fed by hand through the cold nights until it was strong enough to stand.
He knew them. All of them.
When evening came and the sky turned copper, he would guide them to the fold. A sheltered place in the wilderness where they could rest through the night. And there, as the last light faded, he would count them.
One by one, his eyes moving over the fold, his lips moving with the names only he could speak.
Ninety-seven. Ninety-eight. Ninety-nine.
He stopped.
He counted again, slower this time, hoping he had missed one in the dimness. But the number did not change.
Ninety-nine.
One was missing.
The shepherd did not call a meeting. He did not weigh the cost or calculate the risk. He did not stand at the edge of the fold and reason with himself about acceptable losses and practical limits.
He simply turned from the ninety-nine and walked back into the wilderness.
He left them there. The safe, the secure, the obedient ones who had returned when called. He left them not in a fortified barn with thick walls and locked gates, but in the open wild, where the shadows grew long and the wolves began their evening rounds.
He left them for the one.
He searched.
He called its name into the wind, and the wind swallowed his voice and gave nothing back.
He walked the paths it might have taken, the places where the grass grew sweeter, where the streams ran clearer, where a foolish sheep might wander thinking itself wise.
He waded through ravines where the shadows pooled thick and cold. He climbed over rocks that tore at his hands. He pushed through thorns that caught at his cloak and drew blood from his arms.
The moon rose, pale and indifferent, a cold coin in a sky that kept its own accounts. The night grew darker. The sounds of the wilderness grew louder. The howl of something hungry, the rustle of something unseen.
But the shepherd did not turn back.
He did not search until he was tired. He did not search until he had done his due diligence, until he could say with a clear conscience that he had tried.
He searched until he was successful.
And when he found it, the sight nearly broke him.
The sheep was tangled in a thicket of thorns, its fleece torn and matted with blood. Its legs were cut from struggling. Its eyes were wide with a terror that had gone beyond bleating, beyond sound—a terror that had collapsed into a kind of frozen stillness.
It was alive.
Barely.
The shepherd did not raise his staff in anger. He did not lecture it on the dangers of wandering, on the foolishness of leaving the safety of the fold.
He knelt.
He pressed his own flesh against the thorns to free it, feeling them bite into his hands, his arms, his face. He worked carefully, tenderly, speaking to it in low tones—not words, exactly, but sounds of comfort, sounds that said I am here, you are not alone, you are safe now.
When it was free, he lifted the trembling weight onto his shoulders. Not slung across his back like cargo, but cradled on his shoulders, the place of honor, the place where a father carries a child.
The sheep’s blood soaked into his cloak.
Its ragged breathing steadied against his neck. And the shepherd, carrying the weight he had come to find, began the long walk home.
When he returned to the fold, the ninety-nine were still there, safe and asleep.
They had not wandered. They had not been devoured. They had rested through the night, unaware of the drama that had unfolded in the dark.
But the shepherd did not go to them. Not yet.
He called his friends and his neighbors. The other shepherds, the ones who understood the cost of a single sheep lost, the ones who knew what it meant to search in the dark.
They came, and when they saw him standing there, bloodied and exhausted, with the wounded sheep cradled in his arms, they knew.
“Rejoice with me,” the shepherd said, and his voice was raw but bright, his face alight with a joy that seemed too large for his body to contain.
“For I have found my sheep that was lost.”
And they rejoiced.
The ninety-nine had been safe all night.
Unaware. Unscathed.
But the shepherd’s joy was not for them.
The celebration—the bloody hands, the torn cloak, the exhausted elation—was for the one who could not save itself. For the one who had to be carried home on shoulders that bore the scars of the rescue.
Are you still struggling in the thorns?
<3EKO
By the way, THE JESUS FREQUENCY is now available in paperback.
I know you’ve been waiting for the physical print edition. It’s here. 120 pages. Eight chapters that dismantle the religion about Jesus and restore the religion of Jesus. The documented exposure of how the revolution got buried under institutional control. And how it’s breaking through now.
If you have a Kindle, the ebook edition is free all weekend. And if you’ve already read it, a review on Amazon will help others to discover it.
I love you.
Beautiful way to tell this story of how Christ loves and pursues us. He has found me many times in the thorns and brought me back to safety!
That question at the end killed me.
Stay safe, friend.