The Coffee Shop on MLK Boulevard

When Tina Rodriguez opened a small coffee shop on a neglected stretch of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Stockton, California, her friends thought she was making a terrible business decision. The block had three boarded-up storefronts, a shuttered laundromat, and decades of disinvestment. "Nobody's coming there," her brother told her. But Tina had grown up on that street. She knew the people who still lived in those apartments, still walked those sidewalks, still waited at that bus stop every morning in the dark.

She opened at five a.m. She learned names. She offered a free cup to anyone who needed one. Within eighteen months, a barber moved in next door. Then a tutoring center. Then a community garden sprouted in the vacant lot across the street. What everyone else saw as a dead end, Tina saw as a beginning.

Matthew tells us that when Jesus launched His ministry, He didn't go to Jerusalem. He went to Galilee of the Gentiles — a region people dismissed, a place sitting in shadow. And there, in the last place anyone expected, He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven had arrived. He walked along an ordinary lakeshore and called ordinary fishermen to drop everything and follow Him.

The Almighty has never waited for perfect conditions to begin His work. He walks into the overlooked places, calls the unlikely people, and turns what the world has written off into the starting point of something eternal.