Sojourner Truth's Sacred Vessel

In 1851, Sojourner Truth stood before a crowd in Akron, Ohio, and bared her arm. The muscle was hard and knotted from years of forced labor on Dutch-speaking farms in Ulster County, New York. She had been sold five times before she was thirty. Men had treated her body as property — a tool for profit, a thing to be used and discarded.

But Sojourner Truth knew something her enslavers never understood. After her dramatic conversion experience in 1827, she came to believe that her body — scarred, calloused, and weary as it was — belonged to the Living God. She had been bought at a greater price than any auction block could name. And so she refused to let bitterness or despair dictate what she did with the vessel the Almighty had reclaimed.

She walked thousands of miles preaching. She sang hymns that silenced hecklers. She used her towering frame and thunderous voice not for revenge, but for proclaiming the dignity that God writes into human flesh.

Paul told the Corinthians that their bodies were not their own — they had been purchased by the blood of Christ. Every choice about what we do with our hands, our eyes, our appetites is an answer to the question: Who owns this temple? Sojourner Truth answered that question with her whole life. The God who redeemed her deserved every step, every word, every breath she had left to give.