On Jordan’s Banks

By the time the people of Israel left Egypt and wandered forty years in the desert, they had been without a homeland for five centuries. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and their descendants–the Twelve Tribes of Israel­–had been nomads, then slaves in Egypt. They wandered forty years in the desert. Now, at last, they had arrived at the promised land. This was their moment: deliverance from slavery, an end to wandering, a land of their own. But at the last minute, there was a problem.

Now imagine yourself on Jordan’s bank. As an Israelite, you have been assured by Joshua that today is the day. You walk those final miles, but when you reach the river, the scene you find shocks you. The Jordon has escaped its banks. It is a torrent, a raging current, and the plain stretching before it with strewn with a tangle of brush and dense vegetation. Impossible to cross.

How do you feel? Are you angry? Depressed? What do you say to your friends? Do you cry out to God? What will you do now?

Now imagine you are Joshua. As the leader of the Twelve Tribes after the death of Moses, you have been obedient to God in all things. God has told you that today is the day. You have led the people to the river. In any other season the Jordon is five feet deep and one-hundred feet wide, but now it has spread a mile across and is 40-feet deep in places. It’s impassable.

Why did God tell you that today was the day? What will you say to the people? Are you discouraged? Are you angry? Are you ready to give up? What will you do now?

Finally imagine you are a priest. You are one of the chosen few granted the privilege of carrying the Ark of the Covenant. It is the embodiment of God that has led the people in the wilderness. Now Joshua orders you and the other priests to carry the Arc to the water’s edge. When you reach the Jordon, you are surrounded by a thicket of brambles, deafened by the roar of the rushing water. There is nothing ahead but a raging river.

“Go stand in the Jordan,” Joshua tells you.

What will you do? Even if you could swim, no one can survive in this current. Why would God test you like this? And what difference will it make if you follow Joshua’s command, only to be swept away? It’s as if this is a test. “Anyone can trust me on dry ground,” God seems to say. “Do you trust me to enter the flood?” What will you do?

You step into the Jordan.

When has your faith been tested? When have you looked at the raging torrent in your life and thought you couldn’t go on?

For my family it happened in the summer of 1993. Our daughter had been fighting cancer for the last year. It had spread throughout her body. Only massive doses of radioactive iodine kept the tumors at bay. Then the last week in July, my wife was struck on her driver’s side by a car doing sixty mph. Pamela was told she’d never walk again. We wondered how she could continue to teach. Our world looked very dark. Still….

Four weeks later our daughter returned to college for her sophomore year, and Pamela in a wheelchair rolled into her accounting classroom at Augustana. This may not have been as dramatic as the parting of the Jordan, but it felt like a miracle to us. The Spanish poet Antonio Machado wrote, “Anyone who moves forward, even a little, is like Jesus walking on the water.” Like priests confronting the impassable torrent, the miracle happened only because my wife and daughter took the first step.

What obstacles do you face? What is your next step?