JERICHO WALK

by Danna Shirley

      I was a brand new Christian (1980), raised Methodist but attending Cedar Lake Christian Assembly in Biloxi, Mississippi (1983). Everything about the Assemblies was new to me—the worship, the preaching, the tongues and interpretation of tongues, and the singing in the Spirit; how I loved to hear someone sing in the Spirit. It was beautiful and would almost take me into the heavenlies.

      Not too long after becoming a Christian, Evangelist Paul Slater was invited to speak at our church.  Oh, he was wild in the Spirit, something this little Methodist girl was definitely not used to witnessing. On the last night of this revival, Slater preached on how the Israelites walked around Jericho and the walls fell down. In order to relate this to our personal lives today, he began a Jericho Walk around the inside of the sanctuary and invited us to join him in the belief that the “Jericho walls” in our lives would also fall down. This was strange to me considering that my Methodist church back home didn’t even clap after someone sang a special but I joined in the march anyway. I went home that night believing that was the end of my Jericho Walk experience.

      A week or so later I was visiting with another mother where our children attended Christian school together. Jackie was a single mom at the time and trying to run an insurance business out of her mobile home. She lived catty-cornered to the school property, which was convenient to say the least; unfortunately, her five children had to pass a neighborhood bar that adjoined the corner of her property. The bar was in a nondescript building that had housed many innocuous businesses prior to its present establishment. It wasn’t well advertised as a bar, just one lit sign over the door, but it did occupy the building before the church was built. 

      She was complaining about having to raise her children around the bar and as I was listening to her dilemma, a flash of a thought crossed my mind...do a Jericho Walk. Yes, I would do a Jericho Walk around that bar and the walls would come tumbling down. Well, not literally, but you get the picture. The Jericho Walk would put the bar out of business. 

      As a new believer, my faith was way up there but as a former Methodist, I didn’t know about this Jericho Walk idea so I didn’t tell anyone what I planned to do, not even Jackie. If God intervened, great; but if not . . . well, I knew my faith would still be intact.

      I decided to begin on Monday morning after I dropped the kids off at school. The bar wasn’t open that early so I knew I would have the privacy I wanted. I walked one time around on Monday, through tall grass and rubbish and possibly snakes, I didn’t know; then once around each day on Tuesday through Friday...five days. Saturday I made an excuse to my husband for leaving the house so early and leaving the kids, to do my walk on the sixth day! 

      On Sunday I had to walk around the building seven times. Again I got up early and drove the ten miles into town and completed my seventh day, then drove home and got ready for church and returned with the children. I had succeeded in being totally anonymous with my Jericho Walk. 

      I’m not exactly sure I remember the time frame but it must have been within a few weeks that the bar went out of business. We heard through the grapevine that the rent hadn’t been paid in months and the owner had evicted them.  HALLELUJAH!!! My faith had grown by leaps and bounds!

            The icing on the cake was that Jackie, who had been conducting business out of her home, was the next one to rent the building. God does have a sense of humor! Doesn't He? 

written 2007