I admit it – I’m soft. I found out how soft yesterday when we visited a long-time family friend’s property in a remote area of Colorado:

• Two-hour drive to a very small town accessible by US Highway. No problem.
• Then 12 miles up a county road, the last three miles on dirt. Not so bad.
• Leave our car and get into a large 4-wheel drive pick-up truck for another 2.5 miles on dirt roads made soggy by recent rains. It reminded me of riding in such a vehicle in the mountains of India, back in 2014.
• Leave the truck and do the last 2.5 miles on two ATVs. For those of you who can’t imagine June on an ATV, I have photographic evidence!

Camp had an outhouse, a couple of popups, a storage trailer. No electricity. No water. Our friends have 220 acres, bordering 25,000 acres of public land where they do their elk hunting. They love it. As for June and me, we enjoyed the scenery while wondering where the amenities were!

O Lord, what an amazing variety of all you have created! Wild and wonderful is this world you have made… (Psalm 104.24, TPT)

Our “adventure” was only a day: 9 hours from when we left our house until we returned. Nothing like, say, Wycliffe missionaries who go into remote villages to live among the people and translate the scriptures. As it says on the Wycliffe site:

The extreme landscape…requires days of treacherous travel to reach many rural villages. Roads lead to rivers. Rivers lead to footpaths. Footpaths lead to remote villages . . .

I’m no Wycliffe translator, and I’m no John the Baptist either!

Now, John wore clothing made from camel’s hair, tied at his waist with a leather strap, and his food consisted of dried locusts and wild honey. A steady stream of people from Jerusalem, all the surrounding countryside, and the region near the Jordan came out to the wilderness to be baptized by him. (Matthew 3.4, 5, TPT)

As they were leaving, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John. “What kind of man did you see when you went out into the wilderness? Did you expect to see a man who would be easily intimidated? Who was he? Did you expect to see a man decked out in the splendid fashion of the day? Those who wear fancy clothes live like kings in palaces. Or did you encounter a true prophet out in the lonely wilderness? Yes, John was a prophet like those of the past, but he is even more than that! (Matthew 11.7 – 9, TPT)