Planning Your Escape

In a few weeks I will be teaching my students about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Every year when I begin the unit on slavery, I can see the blood boiling and the anger rising. The boys in particular will say what they would have done, and my girls ask why didn’t more people run away. Let’s examine that. If you were conditioned to believe that everyone who looks like you was born to be in a subservient role, how likely are you to fight back? In addition, if you wanted to fight back, where would you go? Fortunately there were brave women like Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who decided within themselves that they would take the risk, run away, and look for a better life in the North. If you’ve been reading this blog over the past few days, you know that my mind has been shaken over the unknown. I talked to a friend recently about what all of this feels like. My plan was to write daily, and then some life issues hit me. But isn’t that why I write? I used to have a sedentary, unfulfilled life, and once I started living life I wanted to write about everything I was discovering and encourage others to live a more fulfilling life. What I respect most about Harriet Tubman is that after she ran and obtained her own freedom, she took an even greater risk to run back into the enemy’s territory to help others gain theirs. I can’t imagine facing that type of danger. We rarely teach whether Tubman was afraid or not, but I surmise that she was. She had to go into the dangerous south, risking her own life and possibly the lives of others, yet she did it anyway. How does your escape impact others? Although I am currently shaking in my shoes, I know that I can’t stay where I was. I can’t stay on the couch doing nothing, while the world around me needs a word of encouragement. I can’t sit idly with all of this word inside of me and not be a light in a dark world. Did I plan my escape, and did I execute my escape? Yes, I did. Do I know others who are either planning an escape or in need of an escape? I sure do, and I bet you do too. One thing I learned at a women’s conference is that free women free other women. More universally free people free other people. It’s not just about you. It’s about reaching back and helping as many as you can escape from their old life in order to become the person God always designed them to be.