(From John 1:23)
Today's religious and cultural "wilderness" needs, and hopefully has, voices that understand the times (like the sons of Issachar) and offer the clarion call to "straighten" God's ways. Christendom, patriotism, and consumerism have, like in every generation from Moses to Christ to Constantine to today, allowed, yea, encouraged movement from straight to crooked. Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah (among others), Jesus, Luther, McLaren, Rollins all have a time when their voices were in their respective wildernesses calling for straightness when all that surrounded them was crooked. A voice in the wilderness is like a ray os Sun peeking through a very cloudy atmosphere. We get so used to clouds that we wonder at what the beam of brightness might mean. It might even be said that we grow to believe with certainty that what is truly crooked we now call straight. We can't tell the difference until a voice is heard declaring that the emperor is naked. The accepted geography of crookedness is a tough place to hear a seemingly new but very accurate voice. People had to leave the accepted crooked city limits to find the voice of straightness in the country. We have to follow our abrahamic instincts and venture from the comfortable to the unknown. Our uncertainty is a challenging and hopefully welcome part of a process traveling toward the zip code of straightness and simplicity.
