Kagawa's Six-Foot Room

In 1909, a young Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa did something his professors could not understand. He left his comfortable dormitory in Kobe and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums, one of the most desperate neighborhoods in all of Japan. Raw sewage ran through the alleys. Tuberculosis claimed lives weekly. Kagawa had already survived the disease himself.

He did not go there to preach at people. He went to share what he had. When a man with a skin disease knocked at his door asking for shelter, Kagawa gave him his own blankets and slept on the floor. When beggars came, he gave away his clothes until he had almost nothing left. He organized labor unions for factory workers earning starvation wages. He built credit cooperatives so the poor could escape loan sharks. Over the following decades, Kagawa helped establish schools, hospitals, and churches — not as charity from a distance, but as someone who had made his home among the suffering.

Isaiah 58 says the fast that pleases the Almighty is not empty ritual but loosing the chains of injustice, sharing your bread with the hungry, and bringing the homeless poor into your house. Kagawa read those words and took them literally. And the promise held true for him as it does for us — that when we pour ourselves out for the afflicted, we become like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail.