Beautiful Feet Bring Good News

They called her Moses.

An unlikely heroine, Harriet Tubman was five-feet tall and suffered from a brain injury at age 15 when a heavy iron weight was hurled in her direction. In the years that followed, she was plagued by sleeping spells and migraine headaches.

Born a slave, Tubman was abused by cruel taskmasters who beat her and scarred her body. She was forced to drag animal traps through icy cold swamplands wearing a thin cloth to cover her feet.

She tasted freedom and escaped her chains in 1850. Harriet described how her perspective changed once she stood on free soil: “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person now that I was free, there was such glory over everything, the sun came up like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.”

Her response to emancipation was to risk all to help guide others to liberty. Rather than sit on her laurels and enjoy life, she willingly chose to encounter hardship and reach out to those who were still in chains. She returned nineteen times and led 300 people to freedom.

Harriet Tubman’s scarred feet were beautiful to those she helped rescue.