Harriet Tubman and the Midnight Refuge

On a freezing December night in 1851, Harriet Tubman crouched with eleven fugitives in a shallow creek bed outside Wilmington, Delaware, slave catchers' dogs baying less than a mile behind them. She had no weapon that could match their numbers. What she had was a whispered prayer and an address — the home of Thomas Garrett, a Quaker stationmaster on the Underground Railroad.

Tubman later recalled that in those desperate hours, she would press her face into the cold earth and speak directly to the Almighty as though He were standing beside her. "I said to the Lord, 'I'm going to hold steady on to You, and I trust You to see me through.'" She made thirteen trips into the slaveholding South, guiding roughly seventy people to freedom, and never lost a single passenger.

What marked Tubman was not fearlessness — she was often terrified — but the deliberate choice to make the Most High her dwelling place. Every journey south was an act of re-entering the danger, and every safe arrival was evidence of a fortress she could not see but had learned to trust.

The psalmist writes, "Because he loves me, I will rescue him; I will protect him, for he acknowledges my name." Tubman did not merely believe God could shelter her. She staked her life, trip after trip, on the promise that He would. That is the difference between admiring the refuge and actually dwelling in it.