Only One is All Good

"And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone," (Mark 10:18 English Standard Version Bible.)

Yet we often except near perfection in people we marry, in leaders and in others. Believers are saints, and saints sometimes sin. Jesus Christ taught us to ask Him for forgiveness daily. Luke 11:2-4 the Message Bible says, "So he said, “When you pray, say,

Father,
Reveal who you are.
Set the world right.
Keep us alive with three square meals.
Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.”"

Harriet Tubman was called Moses after the Biblical Moses because she led hundreds of African Americans out of slavery through trips on the Underground Railroad, not a train but a network of people who hid and helped slaves escape slavery and live in freedom. Large rewards were offered for Harriet Tubman's capture, but with God on her side she was never caught, and she never lost a passenger.

Harriet also married, John Tubman. John was a black man who was born free, but he treated Harriet as if she were his slave and said that if Harriet tried to escape slavery he would tell her slave master!

Harriet hid her plans to escape slavery from her husband. In 1849 traveling through the Underground Railroad, following the North Star, Harriet escaped from slavery on the Brodas plantation in Eastern Shore Maryland. Harriet said, "I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free." She later said, "There was such glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven."

Harriet could have stayed in "heaven," but she decided to go back to slave-states repeatedly to rescue slaves including her children, her brothers (she had 11 siblings) and their families, her elderly parents (Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross) and many others.

Her husband, John Tubman was a hard-hearted man. On one trip when Harriet came back to the Brodas plantation, her husband refused to come to a non-slave state. Harriet didn't waste the trip, she rescued some slaves. John Tubman married another woman.

Some of us are married to people we should have never married, or in relationships that we should have never entered or in other difficult relationships. 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 Complete Jewish Bible says, "To the rest I say — I, not the Lord: if any brother has a wife who is not a believer, and she is satisfied to go on living with him, he should not leave her. Also, if any woman has an unbelieving husband who is satisfied to go on living with her, she is not to leave him. For the unbelieving husband has been set aside for God by the wife, and the unbelieving wife has been set aside for God by the brother — otherwise your children would be “unclean,” but as it is, they are set aside for God. But if the unbelieving spouse separates himself, let him be separated. In circumstances like these, the brother or sister is not enslaved — God has called you to a life of peace. For how do you know, wife, whether you will save your husband? Or how do you know, husband, whether you will save your wife?" 

When her marriage failed, Harriet kept on living and doing good. Harriet served in the Civil War on the side of the Union as a scout, spy and nurse. She was the first woman in U.S. military history to lead an armed expedition. In the Combahee River Raid Harriet led a group of mostly black soldiers in an audacious escape that liberated more than 750 enslaved persons. Movie material? Proverbs-style women are warriors. Read my article "Warrior Women,"

Being a warrior does not mean that a woman lacks nurturing capacity. After the Civil War Harriet went to live on a small farm in Auburn, New York. She eventually turned her home into a home for poor and elderly African Americans.

Harriet was also active in the women's movement. She worked with women like Susan B. Anthony to fight for women's right to vote.

Dr. Derek Grier says in his Ministry Minute "Strong Marriage," "We really have no idea how selfish and how self-centered we are until we commit to spend the rest of our lives loving and making decisions with another person." Read my article "Divorced = Eliminated from the Race?"

Just because John Tubman had no sense to appreciate the woman he had, didn't mean others didn't recognize Harriet's value. Abolitionist John Brown called her, "General Tubman." Solider Nelson Davis and Harriet Tubman married in 1869.

What other warrior women are like Harriet Tubman?

Douglas Brinkley writes in The Washington Post March 1, 2013, article "What would Parks do? Honor Tubman," "What would have truly perturbed her was that Obama has yet to issue an executive order to create a national monument for Harriet Tubman. The paperwork is ready; it just needs the president's signature. . . . Call or write the White House and urge the president to pick up his pen on behalf of history."