“Now the gates of Jericho were securely barred because of the Israelites. No one went out and no one came in.”

–Joshua 6:1

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Two weeks remained before our move-out date.

It had been an exhausting day of preparation and logistics. Managing the medical needs of our family at baseline is challenging, but setting up the infrastructure for our almost-four-year-old’s care, follow-up and services four states away had proven to be loads of paperwork, phone calls, and unresolved pieces that would just need to be handled in person when we arrived.

A few days ago, we’d gotten our immediate housing figured out – a rental 25 minutes away from our property.  We both felt a hard-to-explain peace and confidence about taking this next step closer to our land and doing it now – this very month. But at the same time, my logical (anxious) brain wondered, what are we going to do once we get there? We still won’t be prepared to start building a house, we’ll just be more exhausted than we are now, working to get all the every-day life stuff set up again in a new place, and living closer to a property we don’t yet have the means or the wisdom to build on.

Nearing bedtime, we collapsed on the couch together with the kids and pulled out a Bible Verse storybook my mom had gotten them for Christmas. 

We opened to where we had last left off, and the page read:

“Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.”
-Joshua 1:9

Then, it continued:

“After forty years in the desert, the Israelites were finally ready to enter their Promised Land. The first city they came to was Jericho. It was surrounded by walls and looked impossible to enter!”

Cody and I looked over the top of the book at each other and wearily grinned. They’d wandered in the wilderness, they’d finally reached their land, but actually entering it looked impossible. This was the right story for today.

As we continued through the story of Joshua and the Israelites getting up and walking around the city day after day, and then watching God keep his promise to bring the mighty walls down right before their eyes, my heart was moved. I think we’re supposed to get up there, and just walk around the border of our land. We should do it seven times, just like the Israelites did. I think before we try to move anything forward, we should just walk around it, and take stock of how we need the Lord to do what we cannot.

I finished the story and looked at Cody as I closed the book.

“I think when we get up there,” Cody smiled, “we should walk around the border of our land seven times.”

I laughed out loud. “I had the same thought!”

A week later, I had just finished a run to the song, “The Battle Belongs to You.” I stopped to stretch as I sang along and began praying over all the things. The move, the medical care, Benaiah’s headaches, Cody’s headaches.

I got on my knees.

The missionaries we would be listening to and hosting and caring for, the deep hurts people carry, my kids leaving their friends, the land, the preparation to build a house, the costs coming up. Would it work out? Where would we even start? “Lord, I can’t make it all work. It has to be you! This is your battle, I’m not strong enough.” I prayed.

When you get up there, walk around your land seven times, and ask me to bring down the walls that stand in your way, the thought came again.

I started to cry.

“Cody,” I looked at him as I walked into the house and pulled off my headphones, “I had that walk-around-the-land-seven-times thought again. Do you think we really should? How far around do you think it even is? I’m thinking we should set aside our first seven weeks in North Carolina,” the words were spilling out now, “and take the kids with us, and go every Wednesday morning and walk around the whole border and just beg the Lord to fight the battle for us. We need Him to do this, not just the house build, but everything that follows. Every heart battle that takes place there, every discouraged and weary soul who comes to rest and get their bearings – they’re in a fight that you and I don’t have the power to fix or help with. But He does and we need to ask Him to do it. If we are to have any hope of making a difference, it has to be Him, only Him! But walking all the way around the border that many times is a lot, I don’t know, what do you think?”

“I was serious the first time,” Cody replied. “What do we have to lose? It can only help to set aside that first seven weeks and get our hearts in a place of recognizing we need Him.”

Later, I called my sister to tell her our plan. “We’re calling them the Jericho Weeks, Debby, and you can come, too, if you like, and pray with us.”

“You know what all that walking will do, Beka?” she asked.

“What?” I wondered.

“It will make a path.”

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We are 5 weeks into our time here in North Carolina and our family has walked what we now call “the Eremos mile” five times. Our Jericho circle treads through creeks, thorns, wetlands, swamp, and hilly forest. And not one time has it been easy. I have developed a new sympathy for the fatigue the Israelites may have felt when they roused to go out for lap four and five.

As they marched out of camp day after day for another long walk around the city, I imagine the men of Israel might have quietly wondered what it was accomplishing. God told the priests and the fighting men to walk around an impenetrable wall once every day for six days. Then seven times on the seventh day.  Each soldier and priest surveyed every inch of that wall on foot, not once, but thirteen times. The frustrating wall was constantly in their field of view as they walked. They got to really take in how solid it was as they spent their energy circling but never besieging. Looking but not fighting. Slowly, day after day, they walked and they looked and they knew. There was no way in.

It reminds me of another moment in their early history as free people escaping Egypt.

It took place at the Red Sea, where God led them on purpose to a place with no exit route. But it’s not the moment they walked through the sea on dry land that I’m talking about – it’s the waiting before the path opened up. God didn’t open the waters in the nick of time, as Pharoah crested the horizon, while he was still too far away to catch up. God allowed the Egyptian army to come and make camp.

“Then the angel of God, who had been leading the people of Israel, moved to the rear of the camp. The pillar of cloud also moved from the front and stood behind them.  The cloud settled between the Egyptian and Israelite camps. As darkness fell, the cloud turned to fire, lighting up the night. But the Egyptians and Israelites did not approach each other all night.”

-Exodus 14:19-21

Every man, woman and child in Israel waited on the shore, hour after hour, feeling in their very bodies the impossibility that spread in front of them in the form of the vast sea, and the uncomfortable reality of the enemy camp nearby. There was no way across. And all night the Egyptians were there, but the Lord stood between, not allowing them to approach.

Before He opens a path, I think sometimes the Lord gives me time – deeply uncomfortable time – to take stock of how impossible that path is. I hate that, because I’d rather focus my energy and attention on an area of my life where I feel like I have some control, than circle and circle and constantly hold in my view a situation where I need help and I don’t know how to make headway.

What are all these laps accomplishing? It’s not that walking around walls contributes to what God is doing in some way. Sometimes, “trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” may look like obeying something that makes no sense and produces no progress, just because He told you to do it, and you trust Him.

And perhaps in the walking, the reality of my need sinks deeper and deeper into my heart with every lap until I have finally released the idea that I can work out this problem on my own. I think the longer I walk, the more my heart strains upward, a deep and solemn knowing settling over me that there is no other way, except that the Almighty might reach down and do something – I am at His mercy. But that is a beautiful and profound place to come to, because His mercies run fresh all the time. I am always met with mercy and grace to help me when I come boldly to his throne in my need. And as I obediently walk in circles around the impossible or stand still on its shoreline, perhaps by that seventh lap, on that seventh day, I am ready to die to my own strength.

And that is what prepares me to walk forward in His.

Sometimes those exhausting holding patterns in our lives are training the very thing that is straining against them.

“ The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many warriors with you. If I let all of you fight the Midianites, the Israelites will boast to me that they saved themselves by their own strength.” 

-Judges 7:2

“Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power.”

-Ephesians 6:10

God hasn’t said to Cody and I that the walls will fall down, but we feel His prompting to go walk out this story in a similar vein to the Israelites long ago. What will happen after the seventh circle on the seventh day? We don’t know. Maybe nothing. I hope we see Him more clearly.

And as we press into the unknowns ahead of us, we will have spent seven weeks and thirteen miles in the uncomfortable, necessary work of reminding our hearts

That we are not enough, and that He is.

That we cannot make a way, but that He can.

That this is too hard for us, but that nothing is too hard for Him.

And that is the place we want to kneel before we stand and walk into the next step. May we get low in the waiting and die to our own strength. Then may we stand up, and stand firm, according to the power that is at work within us.

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“That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man,  that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love,  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—  to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us,  to Him be glory…”

-Ephesians 3:16-21

“Have you never heard?
    Have you never understood?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
    the Creator of all the earth.
He never grows weak or weary.
    No one can measure the depths of his understanding.
He gives power to the weak
    and strength to the powerless.

 Even youths will become weak and tired,
    and young men will fall in exhaustion.
But those who trust in the Lord will find new strength.
    They will soar high on wings like eagles.
They will run and not grow weary.
    They will walk and not faint.”

-Isaiah 40:28-31