One of the most beautiful stories in Scripture is this one in the Gospel of Matthew (9:36):
"Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness. When He saw the crowds, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then He said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.…"
Each translation uses different words to describe these crowds. Jesus feels compassion for them because they are: worried, confused, wearied and cast away, distressed, dispirited, dejected, fainting, scattered abroad, worn out, troubled, bewildered. How many times have these words been a description of us! It is so comforting that we can find a shepherd in our need, either Jesus, or someone who is his representative on earth. Often Pastors/Ministers are referred to as shepherds for our souls, even our bodies.
But also, Jesus, feeling compassion, turns to his disciples, saying "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few." Over a period of two thousand years, many men and women have reflected on this passage and heard God's call to them to become moved with compassion themselves, to become shepherds to the crowds in their lives who are helpless, bewildered, distressed, fainting, scattered....In fact, they have become so sensitized by compassion, so aware of what's going on around them, that throughout their lives they have ministered to many different crowds that needed their leadership to free them from whatever ensnared them and kept them helpless, worn out, and troubled.
Harriet Tubman (1820 - 1913) was a great shepherd of God's sheep, who trusted the Lord to lead her out of the chains of slavery, and then to always lead her and guide her throughout her life to different helpless flocks of sheep which needed her leadership and guidance.
Known as the “Moses of her people,” Harriet Tubman was enslaved, escaped, and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor" of the Underground Railroad. Tubman also served as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War. She wanted to help the Army that could free far more slaves then she had saved by herself. She is considered the first African American woman to serve in the military. Tubman was the first woman to lead an assault during the Civil War. She conducted the Combahee River Raid which set free 700 slaves.
Harriet had one word to describe slavery: "hell." She said, "I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could."
Her exact birth date is unknown, because slaveowners didn't bother to record their slaves' births. But Harriet herself estimated her birth as being between 1820 and 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland. Born Araminta Ross, the daughter of Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, Tubman had eight siblings. By age five, Tubman’s owners rented her out to neighbors as a domestic servant.
Although she only grew to five feet in height, much hard work made her physically stronger then many men. Physical violence was a part of her and her family's daily life. Tubman later recounted a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried the scars for the rest of her life.
Early signs of her resistance to slavery and its abuses came at age twelve when she intervened to keep her master from beating an enslaved man who tried to escape. She was hit in the head with a two-pound weight, leaving her with a lifetime of severe headaches and narcolepsy. The injury, she always believed, opened her to visions and dreams from God.
Although slaves were not legally allowed to marry, Tubman entered a marital union with John Tubman, a free black man, in 1844. She took his name and dubbed herself Harriet.
Contrary to legend, Tubman did not create the Underground Railroad; it was established in the late eighteenth century by black and white abolitionists. Tubman likely benefitted from this network of escape routes and safe houses in 1849, when she and two of her brothers escaped north, to Philadelphia, following the North Star.
For the rest of her life, Harriet remembered the exact moment when she realized that she was truly, finally free: "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything. The sun came up like gold through the trees, and I felt like I was in heaven."
But her inner eyes kept traveling back to her home state of Maryland to see the helpless, despairing crowds, milling about without a shepherd to guide them to freedom. They needed someone willing to be another Moses who would rescue them from the bonds of slavery. She knew most of her family were still slaves - and there were many more who could use her help. Somehow she overcame the fear of being recaptured as a fugitive, the fear of knowing a bounty would be placed on her head. She placed all her trust in her Lord - and became fearless. Later, in her biography, she recalled that time when she placed her life and possible death in God's hands. "Oh, how I prayed then, lying all alone on the cold damp ground; 'Oh, dear Lord', I said. 'I haven't got no friend but you. Come to my help Lord, for I'm in trouble!'"
And so eventually she returned to Maryland, and made thirteen trips to help slaves escape to the Northern free states and Canada. Harriet Tubman was the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad. In a decade she guided over seventy slaves to freedom, smuggling them safely around and past posses and bloodhounds, and instructed roughly seventy more, who escaped on their own. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison thought she deserved the nickname 'Moses' because she had the courage to lead her fellow prisoners out of an Egypt of slavery. Tubman said she would listen carefully to the voice of God as she led slaves north, and she would only go where she felt God was leading her.
Amazingly, as she planned her trips, Harriet discovered that when she placed her trust in God, God surfaced many gifts in her that she had not realized that she had. She became a master organizer, and developed a group of black and white friends to help her. She always made her rescue attempts in winter but avoided actually going into plantations. Instead she waited for escaping slaves (to whom she had sent messages) to meet her eight or ten miles away. Slaves would leave plantations on Saturday nights so they wouldn't be missed until Monday morning, after the Sabbath. It would thus often be late on Monday afternoon before their owners would discover them missing. Only then did they post their reward signs, which men hired by Tubman would take down.
But she used tough, relentless love on these slaves who would, like the Israelites, grow frightened on the trip and want to return home, even if home was slavery. If anyone ever wanted to change his or her mind during the journey to freedom and return, Tubman pulled out a gun and said, "You'll be free or die a slave!" Tubman knew that if anyone turned back, it would put her and the other escaping slaves in danger of discovery, capture or even death.
She worked hard to save money to return and save more slaves. In time she built a reputation and many Underground Railroad supporters provided her with funds and shelter to support her trips. Tubman was never caught. She herself said, "I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger." She participated in other antislavery efforts, including supporting John Brown in his failed 1859 raid on the Harpers Ferry, Virginia arsenal.
Through the Underground Railroad, Tubman learned the towns and transportation routes characterizing the South--information that made her important to Union military commanders during the Civil War. As a Union spy and scout, Tubman became a master of disguise. She often transformed herself into an aging woman, or even a man. She would wander the streets under Confederate control and learn from the enslaved population about Confederate troop placements and supply lines. Tubman helped many of these individuals find food, shelter, and even jobs in the North. She also became a respected guerrilla operative. As a nurse, Tubman dispensed herbal remedies to black and white soldiers dying from infection and disease, using what she'd learned back as a slave in Maryland.
Eventually Harriet managed to bring her entire family to settle in St. Catharine's, Ontario, Canada, where there was no danger of any of them being recaptured as slaves. But, after the war, she was persuaded to return to the United States and settled in Auburn, New York. There the Lord showed her new helpless crowds, new sheep without a shepherd - the women of the country, still helpless and dependent on men.
So, after the Civil War, in addition to raising funds for freedmen, Tubman joined Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who had united various women's groups in Seneca Falls, New York, at a convention for women's rights, in their quest for women’s suffrage. Tubman believed in the equality of all people, black or white, male or female, which made her sympathetic to the women’s rights movement. Tubman’s role was not that of a leader but that of a strong supporter. As a woman who had fought for her own freedom and the freedom of others, Tubman set to work with her friends by touring and giving speeches about her own experiences as a female slave and as the liberator of hundreds born under the bondage of slavery. She described her years as “Moses” and the impact she had on those who found freedom. She toured New York, Boston and Washington speaking in favor of women’s suffrage rights.
Harriet Tubman was especially interested in the rights of African American women. In 1896 when she was already frail, she was invited as a guest speaker at the first meeting of the National Association of Colored Women. Despite her being illiterate, Tubman’s speeches were popular and always left people wanting more. In 1897, Queen Victoria recognized her achievements with the gift of a lace-and-silk shawl.
Quietly, competently, Harriet also cared for her aging parents, and worked with white writer Sarah Bradford on a biography of Tubman, "Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman." She got $1,200 from its publication. Her first husband had refused to escape from slavery with her, and had remarried. Now she married a Union soldier, Nelson Davis, also born into slavery, who was more than twenty years her junior. Residing in Auburn, New York, she cared for the elderly in her home and in 1874, the Davises adopted a daughter. After an extensive campaign for a military pension, she was finally awarded $8 per month in 1895 as Davis’s widow (he died in 1888) and $20 in 1899 for her service.
God then opened Harriet's eyes to the plight of the crowds of the aging indigent, and in 1896, she established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged on land near her home. Later, she got a bank loan to purchase additional land, and, aided by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which fundraised for her, she completed renovating the home and staffed it. Later, when she could no longer pay the taxes, she donated her property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Auburn, New York, on the condition that they continue the home.
Harriet Tubman died, probably of pneumonia, in 1913, and was buried with military honors at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York. Fittingly, her tombstone reads "Servant of God, Well Done." Since her death, she has inspired thousands. Schools and homes for battered women have been given her name.
( I got my information from The National Women's History Museum website on which the Harriet Tubman post was edited by Debra Michaels, PhD, in 2015; from the Harriet Tubman Historical Society Website; the Christian History Website, and "Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of An American Hero," by Kate Clifford Larson, PhD.)
Is it any wonder, considering all that Harriet Tubman accomplished, that many American leaders have wanted to have this brave woman's image imprinted on our nation's twenty dollar bill?
Harriet Tubman's faith, courage, and continual, humble listening to God can teach all of us. Although it's important to meditate on Jesus the Christ as our Good Shepherd, Who is faithfully taking care of us, it's equally important to realize that God wants to break the chains of our slavery to fear, self-doubt, and confusion, and transform us into shepherds, so that we can lead and guide the flocks of helpless sheep in our own lives.
If we pray and look around us, we will know our own flock or flocks, our own crowd that seems lost, or confused, or in need of what we can give them. Our family and friends. Our religious community. Our Religious Education class. Our Youth Group or Bible Study group. Our parish/church. Or we're drawn to Special Olympics, or the Red Cross, or the plight of the unborn, or prisoners, or illegal refugees, or people with disabilities. Perhaps we feel led by the Good Shepherd to become a shepherd who leads by example, and we choose to participate in a non-violent march in support of environmental concerns, for racial equality at deeper levels, or for the rights of others who society still keeps in chains, or for the poor, or those who need medical care. We will know what "helpless, confused crowds" need our guidance, our compassion, the knowledge and wisdom and example that we can give them in a unique way, if we listen to our Good Shepherd guiding us.
How can we find the courage to allow this to happen? Harriet Tubman said the following words to Ednah Dow Cheney around 1859:
“God’s time [Emancipation]is always near. He set the North Star in the heavens; He gave me the strength in my limbs; He meant I should be free.”
Our emancipation, our freedom from the chains of our sins, our mistakes, our fears, our self-involvement, is always near. Jesus freed us from all that chains us through his death and resurrection for us! God is our North Star to follow. God will always send us the Holy Spirit to give strength to our limbs, to descend into our hearts so that we too can see visions of what could be, dream dreams of new freedom for us and those helpless, yearning crowds in our lives who ignite us with compassion. If we take a step forward in pursuit of our God-given dreams, God our Good Shepherd will surface the gifts that we need, gifts that have lain inside us, undiscovered until we need them. Can we take a leap of faith? Jesus daily looks into our eyes, speaking to us, as he says "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.…"