From the archives:
Some of us live on old stories.
Not because they are untrue, but because they are familiar.
We remember the seasons when God moved clearly, when deliverance was undeniable, when provision felt like a miracle in our hands.
Those memories become markers in our mind.
We return to them in hard times.
We tell them to our children.
We speak them like testimonies around dinner tables.
Joshua 3 and 4 have always moved me because they show the faithfulness of God to do the same kind of mighty work for the next generation.
Moses led Israel out of Egypt, and God parted the Red Sea.
He made a way where there was no way.
The people walked through on dry ground and watched the enemy swallowed up behind them.
It was a defining moment.
Then came the wilderness.
Forty years of wandering because of unbelief.
Moses died.
A new leader rose.
The nation was now made up of adults who had not all seen the Red Sea with their own eyes.
Some were tiny children then, with no recollection.
Many had been born in the wilderness.
They had only heard the story.
They knew their parents’ testimony, but they did not have their own.
And then God brought them to the Jordan.
Scripture tells us the Jordan overflowed all its banks at that time.
It was not a gentle little stream.
It was a barrier.
A boundary between them and the land God promised.
The Lord commanded the priests to bear the ark and step forward.
The waters would not part in the distance while they stood safely back.
They had to step in.
Joshua tells us that when the feet of the priests touched the brim of the water, the Jordan stopped and stood up in a heap.
The people crossed over on dry ground.
God did not say, remember what I did back then.
He said, watch what I will do now.
Then He told them to take twelve stones from the midst of the Jordan and carry them out as a memorial.
He wanted the next children to ask, what mean these stones.
He wanted fathers to answer with a story.
Not a vague story, but a specific one.
A story that would teach the children that the God who led their parents is still the God who leads them.
That is what comforts me now.
Our children have heard our battle stories.
They have heard about the seasons we did not know how we would make it.
The times we saw the Lord provide out of thin air.
The times we were sustained on a handful of meal in a barrel.
The midnight rescues.
The moments where the only explanation was God.
They have heard the testimony.
They have benefited from it.
But they did not taste the battle in the same way we did.
They did not carry the weight in their own body.
They did not feel the fear in their own chest.
My husband and I have walked many roads, and we have seen the Lord’s faithfulness.
That is why it is both beautiful and difficult to watch God reveal Himself strong in the lives of our adult children.
It is beautiful because it means their faith is becoming personal.
It is difficult because it means they must suffer, endure, and cling to God with their own hands.
I will be honest.
At times this is hard.
This first year of marriage for our son should have been what young couples imagine.
Blissful.
Simple.
Easy in the way new beginnings are supposed to be.
Instead they have fought beasts.
They have climbed mountains.
They have watered their bed with tears in the night over the life of their preemie baby.
And now this illness has come right on the heels of such a joyful time of being together as a family.
It has felt like the waves keep coming before the sand has even settled.
It requires a new kind of strength as a parent to watch this.
A different kind of letting go.
Not the letting go of toddlers who can be soothed by your arms, but the letting go of adults whose burdens you cannot carry for them.
You can pray.
You can weep.
You can support.
But you cannot step into the Jordan for them.
They must step.
God will do it again, but sometimes He does it again through the river you wish your child did not have to face.
The temptation as parents is to become so attached to our own stories of how God moved that we forget He is writing new stories now.
This is where Ezra 3 becomes a warning.
When the foundation of the new temple was laid, the younger generation shouted for joy.
They were rejoicing over what God was doing in their day.
But there were older ones who had seen Solomon’s temple in its former glory.
They remembered what had been.
They had watched it fall.
And now, standing in the dust of a new beginning, they wept loudly.
Their eyes were fixed backward.
Scripture says there was such a mixture of shouting and weeping that the sound could not be discerned.
The joy of the young was swallowed up by the sorrow of the old.
That is a sobering picture.
It is possible to become blind to what God is doing in the present because you are mourning what He did in the past.
It is possible to discourage the next generation because you cannot stop measuring their “temple” against the one you remember.
I do not want to be that kind of older heart.
I want to rejoice when my children see God move, even if the way He moves looks different than the way He moved for me.
I want to celebrate their Jordan crossing, not resent it.
I want to be the voice that tells them, the God who carried us will carry you.
The God who parted seas still parts rivers.
The God who provided then will provide now.
He will do it again.
Not because our children deserve easy lives, but because God is faithful.
Not because we can spare them every hardship, but because God is determined to make their faith real.
Not because we can control their story, but because God is writing it.
And when He does it again, may we gather the stones.
May we mark it.
May we tell the story.
May we speak of the Lord’s hand with reverence.
Because one day their children will ask, what mean these stones.
And they will have their own answer.
And, He will do it again.
Biblical Womanhood
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