Amanda Smith, the Washerwoman, Go to England?

“And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.” — Philippians 4:19 (ESV)

Years into her work, an English woman suggested Amanda come to England for a trip and some rest. Amanda’s first reaction was to laugh at the idea. “Go to England! Amanda Smith, the colored washwoman, go to England!” She decided she would not even pray about it. She figured she had to ask God for so many things she genuinely needed that she was not going to bother him about something as far-fetched as an ocean voyage. “It does well enough for swell people to go,” she thought, “not for me.”

But the sense that God actually wanted her to go kept growing, and so did her fear. Because underneath the “who am I?” was something more specific: Amanda was terrified of the sea. Her whole picture of the ocean was that it was always rough and deadly. She thought about the three thousand miles, about her daughter back home, about all the things that could go wrong, and she wrote a letter turning the trip down. She felt relieved the moment she dropped it in the mailbox — for a little while.

Then, that evening, a wave of darkness came over her that she could not shake. She locked her doors, turned the lamp low, got on her knees, and refused to sleep until she understood what was wrong. She went through everything she had said and done that day looking for some sin — nothing. Finally, quiet, she heard it plainly: “You are going about telling people to trust the Lord in the dark, to trust him when they cannot see him. You tell other people to do what you are not willing to do yourself.” And then the specific truth: “You are afraid to trust the Lord and go to England. You are afraid of the ocean.” Amanda said it took her breath away, because it was exactly, humiliatingly true.

That is worth stopping on, because it is a trap almost everyone falls into and almost no one notices. Amanda made her living, in a sense, telling people to trust God through things they could not see or control. And she had quietly exempted herself from her own message at the one point where it scared her. She was a hypocrite in the original sense — not a villain, just a person whose actions had not caught up to her words. What is admirable is that when God named it, she did not defend herself. She said, “Lord, that is the truth,” repented, and later crossed that ocean alone.

There is a second thing here for anyone who has ever felt too ordinary for anything. On the way, and once she arrived, proud and wealthy passengers looked down on the Black washerwoman traveling first class with no important reason and no one to meet her. Amanda did not argue with them or shrink. In one church she quietly turned and looked two well-dressed women “squarely in the face so they could see I was of the royal black.” She had come to believe she belonged to royal stock — a child of God — and she carried herself like it, whatever anyone thought.

So two questions for you. First: where are you telling other people — a younger sibling, a friend, a teammate — to be brave, honest, or faithful in a way you are privately dodging yourself? And second: where are you letting other people’s ranking of you convince you that big, good things are “for swell people, not for me”?

One thing to do: find the one place your words and your nerve do not match — the advice you give that you will not take. Do the scary thing you keep telling others to do, this week. Stop asking people to trust God in the dark from a spot where you have kept the lights on for yourself.