Walk With Him Wednesday: Selflessness and How To Get There?

At not quite eight years old, Harriet Tubman's life took a tragic turn. While her younger years were carefree, spent with her family in the fields or exploring the woods and catching frogs, as an owned piece of property, a slave, she was expected to work her young body to exhaustion on very little food or restorative sleep, sun-up to sun-down.

On day, while still seven years old, Harriet cared for a fussy baby for hours and then did more strenuous chores in a plantation mansion. At dinner time she helped serve the rich plantation owners, feeling exhausted, hungry, and faint. A dish of candy enticed her in her weakness and need. She tried to sneak a piece and the cruel Mistress, her owner, took down a switch to beat Harriet's already weakened body.

Harriet ran out of the house as fast as she could, with the landowners on her tail. Shrewd for her age, she hid in a pigpen for two days, eating out of the trough at night while the pigs slept, until her father found her and brought her home. She feared being sold for defiantly fleeing, but her father negotiated for a whipping instead.

The Mistress whipped her mercilessly and shoved her against a wall, leaving her to stumble and crawl home on her own. The pain was worse than she'd ever felt and for days she drifted in and out of consciousness, left alone most of the days in her parent's primitive cabin quarters.

Dorothy Sterling's account of Harriet's life, in the book Freedom Train, reveals unbelievable suffering. My heart wandered from tears to anger back to tears, at the magnitude of cruelty this young girl experienced. I could only stare at walls after reading it, trying to process the suffering and cruelty.

The book goes on to describe a teenage Harriet with a courageous, determined spirit. She thought and planned for years how she might escape and in the end she went alone, the memory of the beatings giving her the courage she needed. She wanted to be like Moses, leading her people to freedom.

After she made the trip herself, she ventured back into the South 18 times over many years, bringing more than 300 slaves to freedom. Her people called her Moses and waited for her in the dark of the night, the thought of freedom chasing away their terror.

She risked her life many times over, including in the Civil War that followed. And at 93 years old, pneumonia took her last breath. To all who read her story, she is an epic heroine. One of the giants of our world.

She had strengths and weaknesses like all of us. Admirable and regrettable qualities. So what was it, ultimately? What made her so different? So much a giant in our hearts and minds?

I submit to you yet another reason to rejoice when you face trials of many kinds. Because suffering? It's the only avenue to selflessness. The Bible tells us to be selfless, but it's only through suffering that we get there.

When all comforts, including food and safety, rest and the absence of fear, are taken away, we have to dig deep into our human soul, and finding inadequacy there, we find God and His strength, and make His purpose ours.

Selflessness. That is what made Harriet Tubman an epic giant. That is what gave birth to her Moses-inspired legacy.

And as we read about her life, drinking in the magnitude of her selflessness, we suddenly feel shame at our own complaining and selfishness. We can't be exactly like Jesus, but what about Harriet? Can we marvel at her life and see our suffering not as a curse, but a blessing? Not as a means to ruin our life, but as an avenue to make it count for all eternity?

Matthew 16:25
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.

Exploring the spiritual practice of suffering this week, along with Ann Voskamp and other ladies.