In a couple hours I’ll be dead. I can feel it. I’ve been rotting here in this dungeon for months, waiting for death. It’s just a matter of time. Herod is corrupt and cowardly. He respects me, but he doesn’t have enough of a backbone and integrity to set me free. He’ll kill me. Any day now.

I guess I could have kept myself out of jail if I had shut my mouth, but I wasn’t about to do that. God has chosen me to be his prophet, his messenger, who prepares the world for Christ’s coming, so that’s what I did. I stood in the wilderness. I lived off the land, eating locusts I roasted over a fire and then dipped in wild honey. I yelled at people, “Repent! Get it together! The savior is coming, and you need to get ready by cleaning up your lives.” Hundreds of people would shuffle forward in a line so that I could dunk them, one by one, into the golden river, fish darting around us, the water warm and brilliant. “Repent, be baptized, prepare for his coming. Ready the royal road!” That was my message. When company’s coming, you clean your house. Christ is coming, so clean your heart. Repent, pray, serve the neighbor. Get ready.

Many of the scribes, Pharisees, and other religious big-shots hated my message, because I was often critical of them. “You brood of vipers!” I said to them, “who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” They hated my harshness, but that was what the Holy Spirit pushed me to proclaim.

I smell like soil. I sleep in a cave alone. A part of me longs for a wife to lie next to and kiss, for children, a house to live in, a regular profession. But this is the calling that God has put around my neck.

God called me to this mission even before I was born. An angel appeared to my father Zechariah when he was an old man. The angel told him that I would be born. Dad didn’t believe it, because he and mom were elderly. So the angel struck him mute. Dad could not speak until after I was born and he announced that my name would be John. That was at my bris. Mom told me that when Dad started talking after having been silent all that time, you could have heard a pin drop. And Dad told everyone there about me, that I was going to be the prophet of the Most High, who would go before the Lord to prepare his way. That was my mission, sent from heaven, my destiny, and I have lived it out. I have been lonely and in pain, but I have no regrets. I have lived doing the right thing: preparing people for Christ.

Now a guard enters the prison. He tells me to lay my head on this flat rock in front of me. “Herod wants your head,” he says. This is it. I am finished. The guard will cut my head off, and I will be in the arms of God in heaven. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”.

(from www.goodpreacher.com/blog/)