Crossing Our Own Jordan

The story of Joshua appears to come from another world entirely. Its landscape is marked by wandering tribes, fortified cities, and constant uncertainty. Yet beneath those ancient details lies something deeply familiar. Joshua is less a story about conquest than about learning how to move forward when fear and the unknown collide. Mortality does not unfold as a straight line leading to exaltation. Each of us will someday face our own crossing of the Jordan. The challenge may arrive through debilitating illness, loneliness, or discouragement. It may come when someone we love is drifting spiritually and we realize, slowly and with great sorrow, faith cannot be forced into another human soul. In those moments we stand exactly where Israel stood, on a bank offering safety, staring at water offering no guarantees. The most compelling moment in the Joshua story comes before the river crossing, not after it. While the Israelites stand safely on the bank, the waters remain unchanged. Nothing about the Jordan suggests it will accommodate them. There is no parting visible on the horizon, no obvious invitation to proceed. Then the priests step forward into the river before the miracle occurs. They do not wait for the water to retreat. They move toward it. Only after they turn faith into action does the path open before them. This pattern appears throughout scripture with enough consistency to suggest a divine teaching method. Noah built the ark long before rain appeared on any horizon. Nephi began working on the ship without knowing precisely how it would finally come together, trusting each problem would yield to each day’s effort. The brother of Jared took sixteen small stones into the darkness of a mountain before light touched them. In each case, the miracle followed the movement. The obedience preceded the opening. In time, every crossing demands we step in before the water parts. Today life tells us to wait for certainty. We are surrounded by tools designed to reduce uncertainty, and we have grown to expect answers before we commit. We crave reassurance. We want to see the other bank clearly before we wade into the unfamiliar. But faith, in its truest form, requires the courage to proceed before every question is answered and every risk removed. A young missionary opening his call packet may suddenly find the ground shifting beneath him. The destination is unfamiliar. The people waiting there remain strangers. The language, the culture, the daily rhythm of a mission remain invisible to him in the moment. After the initial excitement fades, questions surface without any immediate answers. Somewhere inside such uncertainty rests an invitation identical to the one the priests received on the bank of the Jordan. Step in. Move before the water moves. Trust what is needed will be given as it is needed, not before. The battle for Jericho introduces another difficult truth. God’s instructions do not always make sense. Marching around fortified walls for seven days while armed soldiers watch from above hardly resembles military strategy. It would have looked foolish from the outside. It may have seemed foolish from the inside. But faith requires obedience before reason becomes clear, as it did generations later when Naaman came seeking healing from Elisha. Naaman arrived in Israel as a man accustomed to being taken seriously. He was a military commander of stature and reputation, but he was plagued with leprosy. He expected Elisha to meet him personally, to make some dramatic gesture, to match the gravity of his condition with a response of equal gravity. Instead he received a message through a servant—wash in the Jordan seven times. The instruction offended him. It appeared too ordinary, too undignified, too small for a man of his suffering. He had to be persuaded even to try. When he finally humbled himself and waded into Jordan’s water seven times, his skin was restored. As with the priests at the Jordan, humility and obedience preceded the miracle. Part of mortality is learning how to rise again after we have stumbled. Spiritual decline can begin when immediate concerns push sacred things away, not out of rebellion but out of demanding responsibilities, discouragement, or fatigue. When compromises settle into accepted conduct, they can become difficult to separate from identity. Guilt accumulates. The gap separating who we are from who we meant to become can look permanent. But Joshua taught Israel failure is not final. When the people stumbled in the days after Jericho, it was not the end of their story. Repentance and humility opened the way forward again. The Jordan did not close behind them permanently. A path forward remains open to us as well, not because our failures are small, but because the Atonement is larger than our failures. We are invited to step in again, to move again, even when we have stood frozen on the bank far longer than we intended. Near the end of his life, Joshua gathered all Israel and issued an uncompromising challenge—Choose you this day whom ye will serve. It was not a gentle suggestion. It was a command framed as a question. The crossing, the battles, the stumbling, the rising again, all of it was preparation for this single moment of reckoning. We too must decide whom we will serve, not once, but again and again, at each new bank, before each new river, one step at a time into water still waiting to part.