The Contractor Who Read Isaiah on a Job Site

Marcus DeLeon had been a faithful church member for twenty years — never missed a Sunday, tithed to the dollar, fasted every Lent. Then one Tuesday morning, he stood in a gutted duplex on Magnolia Street in Memphis, tearing out water-damaged drywall for a nonprofit housing ministry, and something shifted.

The family who lived there — a grandmother raising three grandchildren — had been sleeping in a kitchen with black mold climbing the walls for two years. Two years of prayer requests at churches across the city. Two years of sympathy.

Marcus set down his crowbar and thought about every Wednesday night he'd spent in prayer meetings asking God to "move in our city." He realized God had been waiting for him to move first.

Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line between the fast God rejects and the fast God honors. The rejected fast looks impressive — bowed heads, sackcloth, solemn faces. But the honored fast? It loosens chains. It shares bread. It brings the homeless poor into shelter. It repairs broken walls.

The prophet's promise is staggering: when we stop performing devotion and start practicing justice, our light breaks forth like the dawn. The Almighty doesn't want our hunger pangs. He wants the grandmother on Magnolia Street to sleep in a room where she can breathe.

That's the fast that moves the heart of God.