Stick your toes in

As I mentioned before, the life of Joshua has been of great encouragement as I have waded through this period of transition. As I prepared to leave behind my wanderings in China and faced many unknowns before me, the Lord’s call to Joshua for courage and confidence seemed particularly applicable. Sunday morning, while at church, I was reading through the account of Joshua and the Israelites crossing through the Jordan into the promised land. This story is one that I am quite familiar with and that I have gleaned many lessons from throughout the years. And yet, this morning, the Lord impressed another layer of meaning into the account as one particular detail stood out in stark relief.

The whole account is found in Joshua 3, but the detail was found in verses 14-16. “So when the people broke camp to cross the Jordan, the priests carrying the ark of the covenant went ahead of them. Now the Jordan is at flood stage all during harvest. Yet as soon as the priests who carried the ark reached the Jordan and their feet touched the water’s edge, the water from upstream stopped flowing.”

The beauty in this detail is the Lord’s impeccable (yet to our impatient souls, very last minute) timing. The Israelites went through the whole process of breaking camp and lining up for the march with a seemingly insurmountable barrier of churning waters before them. I can imagine them kind of looking at each other out of the corner of their eyes as they marched straight toward the water. Perhaps some wondered if the Lord really would part the waters yet again. However, sure enough, with the first touch of a foot, those waters piled up just as the Lord had promised.

The Lord didn’t boost the Israelites’ confidence by having them wake up that morning to an unseasonably dried up river bed or a remarkably piled up waterway. Their confidence was to be derived from their memory, from their recollection of all the Lord had done before. They were to remember, and so with great confidence in His promises stick their feet straight into that impassable water. In the past forty years of wandering, and in the deliverance from Egypt before that, the Lord had revealed Himself as enduringly faithful and enduringly powerful.

A practical example of this principle comes from my recent trip to Epcot. At Epcot, there’s a ride called “Test Track,” where you are taken through a simulated test of various safety features on an automobile. Your “car” drives over bumpy roads, whips around hairpin turns, and tests its antilock brakes. All of these tests are covered in the orientation video viewed before being strapped in the car. At the end of the video, the safety instructor says a mystery test will be thrown in at the end. In the ride, when it comes time for this mystery test, you see a cement crash wall in front of you, and a crashed and mangled car in front of a similar cement wall next to you. All of a sudden your car starts accelerating, picking up speed as it barrels toward the wall. At the last moment the wall splits open and you fly out to an open outdoor track.

Are you wondering what on earth this has to do with Joshua and the Jordan? Stay with me for a moment. Now, sitting in that car, facing the cement wall, I didn’t feel fear or anxiety for one second. Why is that? Because I know Disney. I know that Disney is not in the business of using its patrons as crash dummies. Consequently, although no way through was immediately apparent, I knew that one of two things would happen: the car would stop in time before the wall or somehow the wall would be moved. If I didn’t know Disney, didn’t know I was in an amusement park, and was taken by blindfold and randomly deposited on the ride…well, perhaps then there would be reason for a bit of anxiety.

My point is this: it is the knowledge of who the Lord is and the remembrance of what He has done that allows us to march forward even when a way through seems at best unlikely and at worst impossible. He is the God of the last minute deliverance, the one who stayed Abraham’s hand poised for the kill, parted the seas as chariots pounded near, and raised Lazarus four days dead. My encouragement to you, and to myself as I face the unknowns of an upcoming move, is to remember and march on towards that river with the courage to wade on in. He will be faithful to part those waters.