“Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth:
but I have called you friends” (John 15:15).
The day-to-day rhythms of home life change the world. It has always been so.
Harriet joined five siblings when born into a preacher’s family in 1811. A Christian atmosphere permeated the household. Her mother Roxanna poured herself into her little lambs. An “enthusiastic horticulturist,” she once received some flower bulbs as a gift. Harriet, age four, discovered them and somehow thought they were onions, “such as grown people ate and would be very nice for us.”
Persuading her brothers, she sat down with them to a meal of tulip bulbs. The “odd sweetish taste” disappointed them, as did the correcting words of their mother: “My dear children, what you have done makes mamma very sorry. Those were not onions but roots of beautiful flowers, and if you had let them alone, we should have next summer in the garden great beautiful red and yellow flowers such as you never saw.”
Tuberculosis struck Roxanna, and Harriet was allowed to visit her mother once a day. She remembered seeing “the bright red spot on each cheek and her quiet smile.” Roxanna died September 23, 1816, at age 41, leaving seven children. As little ones do, they asked where their mother was. Someone replied, she “had been laid in the ground,” and another said she ”had gone to Heaven.” Three-year-old Henry heard these responses and put them together. One morning, they discovered him digging in the yard. When asked what he was doing, he answered: “Why, I’m going to Heaven to find mamma.” Little Henry would grow up to be perhaps the best-known preacher of his generation in America. Five of his brothers would also enter ministry.
After Roxanna’s death, Harriet’s aunt, a natural teacher, took her in. She soon could read well. Memory work included a catechism and plenty of hymns, poems, and Bible verses. She also discovered Arabian Nights and dreamed of magic carpet rides.
Her father soon remarried, and Harriet settled back into home life. Around age ten, a teacher encouraged her to write, and within two years she penned the standout essay “Can the Immortality of the Soul Be Proved by the Light of Nature?” But for all her intellectual gifts, much of what was said at church remained a mystery to Harriet. She wrote: “Most of father’s sermons were as unintelligible to me as if he had spoken in Choctaw.”
But when she was 14, one of her dad’s simpler messages struck home. He focused on Jesus’ desire to have not just servants but friends. Harriet recalled: “He spoke in direct, simple, and tender language of the great love of Christ and His care for the soul. He pictured Him as patient with our errors, compassionate with our weaknesses, and sympathetic for our sorrows….I sat intent and absorbed. Oh! how much I needed just such a friend, I thought to myself.” During that sermon,
Harriet trusted Jesus. As she walked home from church that day, she said, “It seemed to me as if nature herself were hushing her breath to hear the music of Heaven.”
When her dad arrived home, she fell into his arms and said, “Father, I have given myself to Jesus, and He has taken me.” I never shall forget the expression of his face as he looked down into my earnest, childish eyes….‘Is it so?’ he said, holding me silently to his heart, and I felt the hot tears fall on my head. ‘Then has a new flower blossomed in the Kingdom this day.’”
Harriet grew up to marry a minister herself. She gave birth to seven children in 14 years, and the family scraped by until 1852 when she published Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In a matter of months, her family became rich, and she was numbered among the most famous women in the world.
About the Columnist: Paul V. Harrison has pastored Madison FWB Church in Madison, Alabama since 2015. Previously, he pastored Cross Timbers FWB church in Nashville, Tennessee, for 22 years. He was an adjunct professor at Welch College for 17 years, teaching church history and Greek. Paul is the creator of Classic Sermon Index, a subscription-based online index of over 66,000 sermons, with clients including Harvard, Baylor, and Vanderbilt, among others: classicsermonindex.com.
