About / A Candle Burns Brightly in a Dark Room
“What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed swayed by the wind?” - Matthew 11:7
In the bible, the desert symbolizes the ever-renewing work of God. He works his transformative upheavals out of sight, hidden away in the vast, empty wilderness. This theme resounds throughout the scriptures. God calls Abraham out of Ur to wander aimlessly toward the land promised to his descendants. Moses flees to the arid wastelands of Midian where God spends eighty long years secretly shaping him to lead his people out of Egypt. The Lord leads the newly freed Hebrews through the desert until they at last become His Israel and enter the promised land. In his writings, the prophet Isaiah shares God’s timeless will by speaking of the parched ground bursting into a lush, blooming landscape. John the Baptist fulfilled God’s will by leaving the places of power and culture, instead performing his prophetic work in the Judean desert where nobody had any business whatsoever. And, as Jesus said, the people went out to see him.
In the desert, it is clear what is what. There is no power there. No pride or admiration. There is no wealth. There is nothing the world wants. If a person is in the desert, they came on purpose. They came for a reason.
For what did they come? They came to hear that which nobody else was saying. A voice was crying out in the desert, and what it said they did not hear in their homes, among their friends, from their rabbis, in their synagogues, or in their temple. None of their leaders or figureheads mentioned it. None of their revolutionaries spoke of it. It was something different, not hollow, something that didn’t compromise or rationalize. It had the ring of truth. And so they came.
That voice called people to an absolute repentance—a new beginning inaugurated in baptism—in order to prepare the way for the coming of the Son of God to his world.
Those who came to the desert to see John the Baptist came because he was a prophet. There was nothing else to see, no other reason to come.
And John pointed beyond himself to the one “whose sandal straps he was not worthy to untie.” He existed for the sake of Christ, to bear witness to the one who matters. That is why he came to the desert. He had no other reason to be there.
If you are here in the unpublished, uncelebrated wilderness of the internet, perhaps you too have come to see something. In this case, there is no John the Baptist here, and Jesus has returned to His place in Heaven. John was a shining lamp which burned brightly, and Jesus is the Light of the World, but here there stands only someone unqualified and unworthy holding a tiny, flickering candle. This candle is here because, perhaps, the desert is the only place to be in a time such as this, and God has seen fit to command His least suitable candlebearer to serve in this way.
I am here in the wilderness to hold up the tiny candle to which God has bound me, to help His Church understand what it means to be a Christian, what matters, what we have to offer, and how we have overlooked something critical about the high calling of bearing witness to Christ, our Lord. I am both grieving what I see and ashamed of myself for perceiving it—for whatever others have missed, I have missed more, and however they have sinned, I have sinned more knowingly. May God forgive me for tarrying in His service.
Come, let us remember what it means to be driven to our knees and confess the truth that is larger and stronger and utterly, wholly, infinitely more than the entirety of all existence: Jesus Christ is Lord. Let us know, helplessly and completely in our deepest depths, that this statement expresses all Truth in its entirety. Let us bow low and know, with happy sorrow, that to follow Him, to be Christian, to be the Church, is to leave behind everything else—everything one has ever known, thought, cared about, or believed mattered—and build on a new foundation: Jesus, the Annointed One, the Son of God, who was born a human, lived as one of us, loved us, healed us, revealed to us His kingdom, suffered torture and murder at our hands, descended to rescue those of us in Hell, was resurrected, showed Himself to us risen and alive as very God of very God, returned to Heaven, and sent us His Spirit to lead us into all truth until the day He returns to make His will done on earth as it is in Heaven. Whatever else I have known or know now, all I want is to know Him, crucified, resurrected, and Lord of all. May we know together that He alone is all in all.
As for myself, I do not know how to offer you something worthy of Him, but if you walk this earth, you are the one for whom Christ died and I am your servant. I pray I can be of service to those who have found themselves drawn to these blessed wastelands to seek God with all their heart. It is time to seek Him in spirit and in truth, to hunger and thirst for righteousness, and in His name to love without measure, calculation, or defense, that all may come to know Him and have eternal life (for “this is eternal life: that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent”). Let us pray and try hard to walk in humble obedience, avoiding the many traps in our hearts and the worries and cares of this life that will leave us ashamed on the day of judgment, so we can be renewed in our minds every day and conformed to His good, pleasing, and perfect will.
This blog is about that. It aims to point you to Christ as everything that matters, help you understand what that means (in the ways God makes me able), and help you learn to walk accordingly so you can have the supreme blessing of attaining the goal of Christ as your all-in-all. May God’s good, pleasing, and perfect will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.
Thanks for coming. :) It’s nice to have you. I hope all that fancy talk didn’t drive you away. I’m just some dude. Hey.