Island of Stability

OK, let me open with a disclaimer. I'm a pretty smart gal, but the complex scientific and mathematical details that comprise the discipline of physics are often just beyond (well, way beyond sometimes...) my ability to really get what the folks with all the smarticles are talking about. So, forgive me now for the technical mistakes which you will, no doubt, find in this brief musing. I'm a big picture girl who is forever grateful to those of you who have the gift of understanding the tiniest details of creation.

So, today's the day they fired up the Large Hadron Collider. This is big news, Steven-Hawking-mind-blowing big news. The potential to confirm or negate so much of what we think we know about the universe is amazing. Scientists will be sorting through the data for years.

However, my take on this event is most profoundly shaped by a comment that Max made about it this morning. As he was listing off all the cool things about the collider, he casually mentioned that some part of what is going on in there (in there? on there? is that the way to describe this thing?) might allow us to finally find the island of stability. And that hooked me.

The Island of Stability. A point at which all the magical, tiny elements inside the atom, inside you and me and everything that is, are stable. Can you imagine it? I'm not a huge fan of being still, and I'm not even sure that stillness is our ideal state, but stable? That's a plan I can get behind. Stable implies, to me, not a lack of motion, but a point at which the motion up and down and back and forth and in and out and in all those other infinite directions, the point at which all those vectors are in balance. And balance is all that. All that.

And, because there have been so many times in his life that Max has been just about anywhere but the Island of Stability, this little moment in the kitchen, as he was putting his breakfast dishes in the dishwasher, was particularly poignant. Of all the details he could recall about LHC, the idea of stability on an atomic, sub-atomic level was the one that made him smile. I'm sure he was thinking about all the cool scientific and mathematical implications, but his mother was thinking about all the cool Max implications. He hopped on his bike and headed off to school, and I stood in the kitchen and looked out at the tree in the front yard, and the comings and goings of the neighborhood children, parents, dogs, bikes, etc., praying for him to know that his own particles have achieved some island of stability. Praying that he know Julian's confidence that all will be well.

So sure, I'm no particle physicist, but maybe Max is. And maybe someday he'll discover something no one has ever known, or done, or seen before. That would be totally cool. But the coolest thing would be for him, for all of us, to discover what I am sure God created for our renewal, refreshment, redemption--an island of stability.