The News Too Wonderful to Believe

On June 19, 1865, Union Major General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas, and read aloud General Orders No. 3. Two hundred and fifty thousand enslaved men and women in Texas learned, for the first time, that they were free. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed two and a half years earlier, but the news had never reached them. They had been living as captives long after their liberation had already been secured.

Witnesses described the moment as electric and disorienting. Some people stood frozen, unable to move. Others collapsed weeping in the streets. Some broke into a run, not even knowing where they were going, just needing their bodies to do something with the enormity of what they had heard. A few refused to believe it at all — the news was simply too good, too impossible, too dangerous to trust.

That morning in Galveston mirrors the scene outside a borrowed tomb in Jerusalem. The women came carrying burial spices, resigned to grief. Instead, they met an angel with the most staggering announcement in human history: "He is not here; He has risen." Matthew tells us they left the tomb "afraid yet filled with great joy" — running, trembling, hardly daring to believe.

The resurrection was not a possibility to consider. It was a finished reality to receive. Like those men and women in Galveston, we do not make ourselves free. We hear the news — and we run.