The Way Through
On Fannie Lou Hamer, Tested Faith, and the Ground Where Growth Takes Root
Fannie Lou Hamer said,
“Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom.”
Five feet four inches forward—not backward, not in retreat, but forward, even in the falling.
Hamer understood something most of us spend our lives avoiding. Real faith isn’t forged in comfort. It’s forged in the pressure, in the moments when we can’t see the path ahead, when the cost is high and the outcome is uncertain.
It’s easy to trust God when life feels steady, when the bills are paid, when the relationships are solid, when the health is good. Anyone can believe when the evidence is favorable.
But real faith, the kind that transforms you, is built in the struggle.
It’s built in the waiting, in the moments when God doesn’t clear the path but creates one, step by step, as you move forward in trust.
What if the hard thing you’re going through isn’t the problem but the preparation for who you’re becoming?
Faith Forged in Pressure
There’s a particular kind of faith that only comes through fire.
Not the Sunday morning faith that feels good in the moment, not the prosperity gospel faith that promises ease if you just believe hard enough, but the tested faith.
The kind that doesn’t break when the pressure comes.
Hamer knew this faith. Born into sharecropping poverty in Mississippi, she picked cotton from age six. At 44, she tried to register to vote and lost everything—her job, her home, her safety. She was beaten so badly in a Mississippi jail that she carried the scars for the rest of her life.
And through it all, she sang.
She sang hymns in the jail cell while they beat her. She sang “This Little Light of Mine” at organizing meetings. She sang her way through terror, through trauma, through a level of suffering most of us will never know.
The struggle wasn’t destroying her faith, it was deepening it.
Our greatest growth often comes through our greatest challenge. The soil of struggle has always been the ground where faith takes root. When we pray for God to make a way, we usually imagine a smooth path opening before us—obstacles removed, doors unlocked, the journey made easy.
But sometimes God doesn’t clear the path.
Sometimes he walks it with you. He makes the way as you move, not before.
The miracle isn’t only that the Red Sea parted. It’s that the people had to walk through it while the walls of water still held their shape.
They didn’t get to see dry land first. They had to step into the opening while the threat was still visible, while the impossibility was still there, while every logical reason to turn back was staring them in the face. That’s faith—not the absence of fear, not the guarantee of safety, but the willingness to walk through while the waters are still standing.
The Invitation Inside the Obstacle
Scripture reminds us that God is a Way Maker, a Light in the darkness, a presence that does not always remove the storm but steadies us through it.
Hamer testified before the 1964 Democratic National Convention about the violence she faced trying to vote. She looked at the cameras, at the whole country, and asked:
“Is this America?”
She didn’t ask God to remove her from America. She didn’t ask to escape the struggle.
She asked God to help her transform it, to make a way through it, to use her presence in the fire to forge something stronger than what existed before.
Each obstacle becomes an invitation to grow into who we were always meant to be. The challenge you’re facing isn’t random. It’s not punishment. It’s not evidence that God forgot about you or that your faith isn’t strong enough.
It’s preparation.
The waiting is not time wasted. The struggle is not a detour. The pressure is not proof that you’re off track. It’s the exact place where you’re being shaped into someone who can carry what’s coming next.
Maybe faith isn’t about escaping the hard thing.
Maybe its about discovering who we are with God in the middle of it. Maybe the point isn’t to get out of the fire but to realize that God is in the fire with us, and that what we’re becoming in there is more important than what we’re going through.
For those of us who pray, who believe, who keep showing up even when it’s hard, God doesn’t always make a way out.
Sometimes He makes a way through. And the through is where the transformation happens.
Preparation, Not Punishment
We think the presence of struggle means the absence of blessing, that if we were really faithful, really favored, really in God’s will, the path would be easier.
But look at Hamer’s life.
Look at her testimony. If struggle meant God’s absence, then she should have been abandoned. But she wasn’t. She was sustained, strengthened, made into a woman whose five-foot-four-inch frame carried a faith so powerful it helped change a nation.
She once said,
“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
She didn’t wait for her own liberation to be complete before she fought for others. She didn’t need the struggle to be over before she trusted God’s presence in it.
God is not making you suffer to teach you a lesson. He’s walking with you through something that will shape you, strengthen you, and prepare you for a calling you can’t yet see.
The waiting is not time wasted.
It’s time becoming.
The struggle is not a sign you’re failing. It’s evidence you’re being forged into something stronger. Fannie Lou Hamer never made it to the Promised Land she fought for. She died at 59, her body worn out from the struggle.
But she died five feet four inches forward, having made a way for thousands who came after her. That’s what faith does. It doesn’t promise you’ll escape the hard thing. It promises you won’t go through it alone.
Even more, it promises that what you’re walking through has purpose, even when you can’t see it yet.
God Makes a Way Through
If you’re in the middle of something hard right now, if the path isn’t clear, if the pressure is building, if you’re wondering why God hasn’t removed the obstacle, God doesn’t just make a way out.
He makes a way through.
And the through is where you meet Him, where you discover what you’re made of, where you find a faith that can’t be shaken because it was built in the shaking.
Hamer sang in the jail cell. She organized while being terrorized. She testified while the wounds were still fresh. Not because the struggle was over, but because God was present in the struggle, making a way through it, one step at a time.
The invitation is to stop waiting for the hard thing to end before you trust God’s presence, to stop treating the struggle as evidence that something’s wrong, to start recognizing that the pressure is the place where faith becomes real.
The Red Sea didn’t part and then disappear.
It stayed there, walls of water on both sides, while the people walked through. They had to keep walking while the threat was visible, while the impossibility surrounded them, while every step required trust that the way being made would hold.
And it did.
Not because they could see the end, but because they kept walking.
So keep walking through the pressure, through the uncertainty, through the waiting and the struggle and the moments when you can’t see what’s next.
God is making a way—not around it, not over it, not out of it, but through it.
And on the other side, you’ll be someone you couldn’t have become any other way.
In solidarity,
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this edition of Freedom Papers. If you found this piece meaningful, share it with a friend. Let our stories of resilience, justice, and love continue to inspire others, as we all work toward a better, more inclusive future. And write. Write, day and night, my friend. We are running out of time.
"Fannie Lou Hamer never made it to the Promised Land she fought for. She died at 59, her body worn out from the struggle.
But she died five feet four inches forward, having made a way for thousands who came after her. That’s what faith does. It doesn’t promise you’ll escape the hard thing. It promises you won’t go through it alone.
Even more, it promises that what you’re walking through has purpose, even when you can’t see it yet."