TONIGHT 2/1/21: 7:14PM EST on our Facebook Page, join us for our first SLOL Live as we discuss Harriet Tubman!
That God has chosen to use women at every twist and turn of history’s narrative is well documented in Scripture. We were created to be courageous, compassionate participants in an even greater story…The story of God’s redemption at work in and among His creation. We smile at the future because we know Who directs the future. And we take the healing we received from the pain of the past and use it to bandage the wounds of every hurting child and woman we meet. That was the story of Harriett Tubman, born into slavery.
Harriet spoke of courage conceived in a personal faith:
“It wasn’t me, it was the Lord! I always told Him, ‘I trust to you. I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I expect You to lead me,’ and He always did.”
She spoke of a fierce love that drove her to risk her life 19 times to transport hundreds of slaves through danger and peril to freedom, crying out to the darkness,
“If I be free, they be free!”
With all the ugliness of abuse in her story, there is yet so much more beauty. Her courage transferred to freedom for hundreds of slaves and then an entire nation. The run to freedom became the Underground Railroad, and President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
For Harriet, courage, love, and passion took strength from hate. Not hate for people but hatred of slavery. “Never wound a snake,” she said. “Kill it.”
This trinity should live in all of us:
- Courage conceived in prayer and birthed in the moment of need.
- Love bountifully and unconditionally received in redemption and poured back out in abundance.
- A hatred of sin, never of people. That we would confess our sin, meaning to agree with God about it. To hate it as He hates it. To kill the snake.
Let us pray as Harriett did,
“And I prayed to God to make me strong and able to fight,
and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”
Strength to fight for the enslaved who cannot cross to freedom on their own. To keep believing in peace when others have given up. To keep on praying for healing to flow through rivers of grace over and over and over in our nation.
In whatever way the Lord leads, to whomever, you meet or know along the way, speak of love, speak of grace.
We are the women who bring the Good News.
Always Expect Amazing,
Diane Strack
SLOL Founder and President
P.S. See you tonight LIVE on our Facebook page for our first SLOL Live with our team!