Harriet Tubman's Midnight Pilot

On a moonless night in 1849, Harriet Tubman stepped off the Brodess plantation in Dorchester County, Maryland, with nothing but the clothes on her back and a prayer on her lips. Armed men hunted her. Bloodhounds tracked her scent through the swamps. Yet she later testified that she never once felt alone — the Almighty was her light and her salvation.

Over the next decade, Tubman made thirteen trips back into slave territory, guiding roughly seventy people to freedom along the Underground Railroad. When asked how she found courage to walk straight into danger again and again, she answered simply: "I always told God, 'I'm going to hold steady on to You, and You've got to see me through.'"

She faced armies of slavecatchers, bounties on her head totaling forty thousand dollars, and the constant threat of betrayal. Yet her confidence never rested in her own cleverness or the darkness that concealed her. It rested in the One she called her Pilot.

The psalmist David knew the same desperate arithmetic — enemies closing in, no human rescue in sight — and arrived at the same unshakable conclusion: "Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear." What made David bold was not the absence of danger but the presence of God. What carried Tubman through those midnight swamps was the same ancient truth: the Lord is my light. When He leads, even the darkest road becomes the way home.