Letters Left Behind

On the morning of May 4, 1961, thirteen volunteers gathered at a Greyhound terminal in Washington, D.C. Before boarding two interstate buses bound for New Orleans, several of them did something that reveals the weight of what they were about to do — they wrote last wills and testaments. These Freedom Riders, organized by James Farmer and the Congress of Racial Equality, were not heading into the unknown. They knew exactly what awaited them in the Deep South. They had counted the cost.

Among them was John Lewis, a twenty-one-year-old seminary student from Nashville. He carried no weapon, no guarantee of safety — only the conviction that segregated bus terminals violated not just federal law but moral law. When the Greyhound bus reached Anniston, Alabama on May 14, a mob slashed its tires and firebombed it. In Birmingham, riders were beaten with pipes and fists while police stayed conspicuously absent. Lewis himself had already been bloodied in Rock Hill, South Carolina, days earlier.

Yet not one of them turned back.

When Peter stood before the Sanhedrin in Acts 5:29, he declared, "We must obey God rather than human beings." That single sentence captures what those thirteen people understood at the bus terminal — that faithfulness to what is right sometimes requires you to write your will before you take your first step. Obedience to the Most High has never promised safety. It has only ever promised that the cost is worth paying.