Harriet Beecher Stowe was able to have it all, raising seven children including having a toddler afoot while she published a series of harsh-reality tales for an anti-slavery newsletter over the course of a year. Those tales became a book, published in 1952: Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Harriet started a revolution. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Holy Bible. It helped galvanize the abolitionist movement and provided a continuing moral impetus for the North during the Civil War. According to legend, Lincoln tells her, “so you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” (Library, 2013).
I finished listening to Harriet’s biography when I dropped my fourth grader off at school five years ago. It moved me to imagine this woman raising not one child but seven and writing a book that was not only controversial, but during a time when extremists could be dragged from their houses and hung. I had my own dreams and destiny. I had my own naysayers. And I wondered if any of it would matter in the end.
I turned off the audio book and I heard a clear voice that day: “You will be the little woman who ends a great war.”
I knew the nature of that war. The battle for souls. The war between good and evil. The war going on inside each of us that holds us captive to the ego. It’s the reason I created Liberation Training. If we can simply climb out of our own darkness and find release from our personal shadows, then we have a freedom that no one can take. #EndYourWar I’ve claimed that hashtag. I’ve used it to create youtube videos. In one video I even used excerpts from the movie War Games.