A Path Made Straight

Luke 3:3-4 (KJV) speaks of John the Baptist:
3 And he came into all the country
about Jordan, preaching the baptism
of repentance for the remission of
sins;
4 As it is written in the book of the
words of Esaias the prophet, saying,
The voice of one crying in the
wilderness, Prepare ye the way of
the Lord, make his paths straight.

One week ago today, I had been months in the cold, dark places devoid of faith; I had turned from God in an act of will and had been occupied constantly by the enemy; I had lost all hope but for a solitary glimmer I couldn't even catch a glimpse of very often. A very small voice had whispered:
don't waste me.
I could barely hear it, but it brought me to call up a friend and erstwhile spiritual mentor to just "give it one last shot" by asking him to pray with me.

I then underwent the transformation of greatest spiritual distance over the least amount of time (the steepest spiritual gradient vector) that I'd ever experienced. In under an hour, I had risen up, laughing-crying-whooping and praising the Lord, in a newfound life.

One of the first things I felt, and the only way it came to me to explain the incredibly steep gradient of spiritual transformation that had occurred, was that the Lord had made my path straight: straight to Him. I looked back to see where I had been and indeed, in my mind I saw a straight path leading from there to here. Of course, my next thought was, "Ack! Ack! Blasphemy! Can't-think-that!"

But a part of me still wishes humbly to suggest that perhaps that was what happened. He gave me this enormous, incredible gift I could never hope to deserve (and we can think of many other gifts of this character that He has bestowed upon all of us) and made straight my path to His open arms.

Because, I'm telling you, I started so far away from Jesus that, to get to Him, the path needed not only to be straight but to be downhill for me to have ANY chance of making it!

I was coming from a place of spiritual weakness and destitution. There was no energy in me to carry me forward anyplace. I was out of gas, sitting motionless but shivering and watching my breath come out in white clouds of condensation, in a car whose inner temperature had slowly been sucked down to approximately that of the outer darkness that had surrounded me.

Given its choice of places to go, a particle (like, say, an electron) will tend to go down the path of least resistance (sound familiar?). If an electron's traveling down a voltage gradient and sees two paths, one of which has a resistor with a HUGE resistance value and the other of a low resistance value, which way is it going to travel; which way is the current (the big stream o' electrons) going to flow? Any student of electronics will tell you: through the smaller resistor.**

Now, if you're an electron in a circuit and ALL paths available to you have a high resistance, what happens then? Well, not many electrons will make it through at all: the current going through the circuit will be very low. Are you with me here?

The Lord reached into my low-current, impossibly impassible circuit and, by His will, simply plucked out a big-time resistor blocking the path to Him and laid down a simple wire in its place. He made this electron's path straight. I opened my heart to that path and flowed straight to Him.

Hallelujah!


** This is why, if you're looking at a live circuit and see resistors of different values in there, DON'T TOUCH the ones with smallest resistance; they'll be HOT from all the current racing through them! It's rather easy to burn out low-resistance circuit elements; one time when I toasted a resistor, I clipped it out of the circuit, and scotch-taped the blackened, singed component to the wall with a label of warning: "Resistance is Futile."


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