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By Melissa Lauber

I like it when mathematicians write complicated equations on glass. There is something intriguing about the transparent complexity that seems to hold a sense of potential and wonder.

But despite my fascination, math is a foreign language to me. I am not a numbers person, yet during the past few weeks numbers have caught my attention.

For instance, driving home from work one evening, I heard on the radio that one in every 20 adults in Washington, D.C., is infected with AIDS. Up to one-third of them do not know they are HIV-positive. The District has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the nation, 10 times the national average.

The numbers were said so matter-of-factly.

I found myself trying to put faces on the numbers, give them families and favorite breakfast cereals, plans to fill their calendars and fears that haunted them at night. I wanted to know their stories.

The next evening, I heard on the news that 40 percent of the homeless are families with children. Really?

I went to the Children's Defense Fund Web site, where this figure was confirmed. But they were also stressing some different numbers.

According to a new report, 'the horrific death toll from gunfire in the United States included 2,867 children and teens in 2002 ? nearly eight deaths a day and 55 a week.'

More children die from gunfire in the United States than cancer, pneumonia, influenza and HIV/AIDS. From 1979 through 2002, a total of 95,761 children and teens were killed by firearms in America, more than the number of soldiers killed in battle deaths in the Vietnam War.

Again, stories began to unravel from the numbers. Behind the statistics were rows of tiny coffins. I could peer into the closets and drawers of the 1.4 million homes in which the American Journal of Public Health reported that guns were kept unlocked and loaded or with ammunition nearby.

In my mind I began to multiply those numbers by poverty rates, illiteracy statistics, health care benefit bottom lines and a host of other factors. It didn't take long for me to feel swamped.

I turned my Web search to the church, where I knew I would find brighter numbers. The Barna Group always has interesting statistics so I visited there.

While I didn't find comfort, I did learn some interesting numbers.

• A 2004 study of Protestant churches found that a human being did not answer the telephone in 55 percent of the churches surveyors called, and in one in five of those churches, neither a person nor an answering machine responded.
• Evangelical and born-again Christians are less likely to recycle than atheists and agnostics.
• In 2003, 80 percent of U.S. households donated money to non-profit organizations. Three out of every four of these dollars went to churches; representing 2.2 percent of those families' gross income.
• Eighty percent of adults surveyed in 2004 rejected the proposal to remove the Ten Commandments from government buildings. Sixty percent were strongly opposed.

The next day at work, Conference Treasurer Pier McPayten sent over a listing of churches and their apportionment payments for 2004 to be published in this issue of the paper.

Frankly, I've always found this list rather boring and I would just glance at it to see which churches hadn't paid their apportionments. (Five Baltimore-Washington Conference churches did not pay one penny toward apportionments in 2004. Sixty-six paid less than 50 percent toward their connectional giving.)

But this time, with my new numbers-focus, the percentages and dollars began to take on a different light. Of the 695 churches in the Baltimore-Washington Conference, 554, or 80 percent, paid their appointments in full.

In 2004, United Methodists in this region gave more than $14 million to expand the horizons of mission and ministry. It's money that will go to work in God's name. Where there's illness, violence, grief, pain and hopelessness, these dollars will follow.

Contemplating that, my mind went to the numbers Jesus dealt with and I found hope in his five loaves and two fish that fed 5,000 people, with 12 baskets of leftovers. Jesus held what was given to him up to God for a blessing. God didn't disappoint.

That, I believe, is the point of apportionments ? or connectional giving. In some complex equation, when the money is shared and held up to God to be a blessing, it creates a critical mass that allows the many to accomplish much more than the one.

That's what draws disciples together. That's what transforms dollars into hope.
I think that's probably why I like the complicated equations written on glass. On a blackboard, the numbers are all one sees. But when they're written on a transparent surface, the world shows through. The math is taken out of its ivory-tower and strewn among us and we can begin to imagine the dollars that the church adds up at work in AIDS clinics, in places where violence rips apart lives and in countless other places where statistics camouflage the human condition.

If the glass the mathematician writes on happens to be a window, whole new metaphors are born; and if the glass is a mirror, well, one can only imagine how numbers ? in the form of tithes, offerings and apportionments ? might reflect our soul.

There is a well-known cartoon in which two mathematicians are standing in front of a blackboard full of a complex equation. One points to the numbers, to explain what neither of them can seem to figure out, and says, 'And then, a miracle occurs.'

I don't know if the 554 churches that paid their full apportionment believe or expect miracles to come from it. I pray they will. But there will be stories behind all of the budget's numbers ? complex, transparent and full of potential wonders.