Edition #72 | The Raid That Was Not Supposed to Work | Tuesday, June 2, 2026

When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves, in order to do all that we can.

Let's get into it.

On the night of June 2, 1863, Harriet Tubman led 150 Black Union soldiers up the Combahee River in South Carolina. Their mission was to burn the rice mills and bridges that supplied the Confederate army and to bring out as many enslaved people as they could reach.

Tubman had spent the previous months going back and forth across that same ground herself. She knew the rivers, the rice fields, the plantations, the movement of the pickets, and which people were ready to run. She carried that knowledge because she had done the dangerous work of walking it herself.

Many in the military command did not expect this kind of operation to succeed with Black troops under the guidance of a woman who had once been enslaved. The plan required moving at night, striking multiple targets quickly, and keeping hundreds of newly freed people organized while still behind enemy lines.

Tubman insisted on the details she had gathered with her own eyes and ears. She did not rely on what the officers already believed was possible. The raid worked. More than seven hundred people were brought out. The only Union losses were two soldiers who got into the whiskey and had to be carried.

She had done the hard, quiet work of learning the actual situation. Then she had the courage to act on what she knew instead of what powerful people preferred to believe.

Tubman had every reason to be afraid, yet she chose to act with power and discipline. This verse captures the shift from fear to courageous action, exactly what she modeled when she refused to let the accepted story of slavery remain unchallenged.

Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, wrote that everything can be taken from a person except one thing: the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. Tubman could not single-handedly end slavery. What she could do was refuse to accept the situation as unchangeable for the people still trapped inside it. She changed what she could, her own willingness to act on the truth she had gathered.

This week, with the young person you are shaping, pick one real situation in their life, their team, their job, or their family where the accepted story and the actual situation are not the same.

Together, go gather better information. Ask the people closest to the work. Look at the real numbers, the actual schedule, or the real conversations. Write down what you actually find, even if it contradicts what everyone prefers to believe.

Then make one small decision or take one small action based on that more accurate map instead of the comfortable one. Talk about what it took to choose the truth over the easier version.