Harriet Tubman and the God Who Never Slept

On a moonless December night in 1851, Harriet Tubman led a group of eleven fugitives through the frozen marshlands of Maryland's Eastern Shore. The temperature had dropped well below freezing. Slave catchers with dogs patrolled the roads behind them. Every shadow could mean capture — or worse.

Tubman later told her biographer Sarah Bradford that she never once doubted they were being watched over. Not by the patrollers, but by the Almighty. "I always told God, 'I trust You. I don't know where to go or what to do, but I expect You to lead me,'" she said. And lead He did — through creek beds that masked their scent, past farmhouses where candles appeared in windows at just the right moment, along routes that opened when every path seemed closed.

What sustained Tubman across thirteen rescue missions and roughly seventy freed souls was not her own vigilance, remarkable as it was. It was her unshakeable conviction that the God of Israel kept watch when human eyes failed. She could rest because He did not.

The psalmist understood this same truth centuries earlier. "He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." Psalm 121 was sung by pilgrims on dangerous roads to Jerusalem — travelers who, like Tubman's passengers, had to trust that their Keeper saw what they could not. The Lord watched over their coming and going, just as He watches over ours — from this time forth and forevermore.