Jericho

 

“The seventh time around, the priests blew the horns and Joshua said to the people, “Now shout, for the LORD has given you the city.”

Joshua 6:16

Every morning, during my battle with severe anxiety, my husband would bring me breakfast in bed and walk with me hand in hand on a morning walk before I headed to work. He did everything he possibly could to keep me going. He fought for me.

Then one morning, I asked my husband of three months to do something different. “Would you pray over me?” I asked. He immediately went and grabbed his Bible before laying his hands gently on mine.

I’ll never forget, as long as I live, how confused I was when he began reading the story of Jericho. I didn’t want to be rude, but the verses seemed random, and I left for work grateful for his sweet prayers, but wondering what I could get out of the walls of Jericho.

I spent my twenty-minute drive to work mulling over the power of prayer and what a gift it was that I married a man who was so comfortable praying for me. When I arrived at work, I went straight to my classroom to drop my bags before heading to the school office to check my mailbox.

I recall noticing that most of the mailboxes were empty that morning, so when I found a little white book in mine, I was pleasantly surprised. There was no note with the book, no indication of who the book had come from. I had about ten minutes before the students were to arrive, so I returned to my classroom and opened up to the first page.

“Here is what you need to know about the walls of Jericho,” the small book written by Max Lucado began. A shiver ran down my spine.

My eyes filled with tears as I read on, “They were immense. They wrapped around the city like a suit of armor, two concentric circles of stone rising a total of forty feet above the ground. Impenetrable… Joshua’s soldiers never swung a hammer. His men never dislodged a brick… The shaking, quaking, rumbling, and tumbling of the thick, impervious walls? God did that for them. God will do that for you.”

Jericho. It suddenly all made sense.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever have God speak to me as clearly as He did that day. In such a sweet and surprising way, God used two people (the second I’ll never know) to tell me that He was fighting for me, that He would tear down the walls for me if I could just hold on and trust that He had already won the battle.