The first man got sleepy. “I’ll sit where people can read my sign as I sleep,” he decided. So he took his sign off his shoulders and propped it up against a boulder. He leaned against it and fell asleep. As he slept his arm slid over the sign, blocking one of the two words. So rather than read “Bridge Out,” his sign simply stated “Bridge.”

The second didn’t grow tired, but he did grow conceited. The longer he stood warning the people the more important he felt. A few even pulled off to the side of the road to thank him for the job well done. “We might have died had you not told us to slow down,” they applauded. “You’re so right,” he thought to himself. “How many people would be lost were it not for me?”

Presently he came to think that he was just as important as his sign. So he took it off, set it up on the ground, and stood beside it. As he did, he was unaware that he, too, was blocking one word of his warning. He was standing in front of the word “Speed.” All the drivers could read was the word “Reduce.” Most thought he was advertising a diet plan.

The third man was not tired like the first, nor self-consumed like the second. But he was concerned about the message of his sign. “Right Road Only,” it read.

It troubled him that his message was so narrow, so dogmatic. “People should be given a choice in the matter. Who am I to tell them which is the right road and which is the wrong road?”

So he decided to alter the wording of the sign. He marked out the word “Only” and changed it to “Preferred.”

“Hmm,” he thought, “that’s still too strident. One is best not to moralize. So he marked out the word “Preferred” and wrote “Suggested.”

That still didn’t seem right, “Might offend people if they think I’m suggesting I know something they don’t.”

So he thought and thought and finally marked through the word “Suggested” and replaced it with a more neutral phrase. “Ahh, just right,” he said to himself as he backed off and read the words: “Right Road—One of Two Equally Valid Alternatives.”

And so as the first man slept and the second stood and the third altered the message, one car after another plunged into the river.

He is the One who comes after me. I am not good enough to tie the strings of his sandals. John 1:27