The Moses of Her People

Between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman made thirteen trips from freedom back into the slave-holding South — back into the very darkness she had escaped. Born into slavery around 1822 on Maryland's Eastern Shore, she had fled north in 1849. But freedom tasted incomplete while her family remained in chains.

On winter nights when the darkness stretched longest, Tubman slipped across the Mason-Dixon line into Dorchester County, Maryland. She navigated by the North Star, waded through icy creeks to throw off tracking dogs, and hid her passengers in root cellars and haystacks along the Underground Railroad. At stations like Thomas Garrett's home in Wilmington, Delaware, fugitives found shoes, food, and the courage to keep moving. Over those ten years, Tubman personally guided more than seventy people to freedom — and never lost a single one.

Those who traveled with her called her "Moses."

The name was no accident. In Exodus 3:7-8, God tells Moses, "I have indeed seen the misery of my people... I have heard them crying out... and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them." God heard the cry of the enslaved and raised up a deliverer — not once, but again and again.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is hearing the cries of the suffering and going back into the darkness anyway — because the God who sees and hears has called you to move.