Across the Jordan

The Jordan is at flood stage, brown and swollen and moving fast, the kind of water no one fords on foot. And the order is to cross. The priests carrying the ark walk down to the bank and keep walking, and here is the thing easy to miss: the water does not part to make room for them. They have to step into it first. The moment the soles of their feet touch the edge of the river, far upstream the water piles into a heap and the channel below them empties out, and where a flooded river ran there is suddenly only mud and stones. A whole nation walks across on the riverbed. Forty years of wandering, every false start and buried generation, and it ends in a single crossing on dry ground. On the far bank Joshua has twelve men carry up twelve stones out of the middle of the river and stack them where everyone can see. They are not decoration. They are for the children not yet born, who will one day point and ask what these stones mean, so that someone can tell them the river was cut off and the people passed over.

The wilderness does end. That is worth hearing plainly if you have begun to suspect it never will. There is a far bank, and there is a day you step onto it, and the same God who opened a sea to bring you in is able to open a river to bring you out. But notice how the way opened. The priests stepped into the flood before it parted. So often the road out of disorientation does not clear ahead of you and then invite you forward; it clears as you move toward it, one wet step at a time, the parting coming only after the feet are already in the water. And mark the crossing when it comes. Build something. Stack the stones. Write the date, tell the story, set down some marker you cannot argue away later, because there will be harder days when you will need to remember that God once dried up a river to bring you through. Memory is not sentiment here. It is fuel. The stones on the bank are there so that future fear has something solid to run into.