The Dentist Who Closed His Practice on Fridays

Dr. James Chen had fasted every Friday for fifteen years. No food from sundown Thursday to sundown Friday — just water, prayer, and Scripture. He was disciplined, devout, and deeply sincere.

Then one Friday morning, while reading Isaiah 58, a question lodged in his chest like a stone: what good was an empty stomach if his hands stayed idle?

That week, James called the free clinic on Barker Street in southeast Portland. They hadn't had a dentist in seven months. Children were showing up to school with abscesses. Adults were losing teeth they couldn't afford to save.

So James made a decision. Every Friday, he closed his private practice — the one that billed four hundred dollars an hour — and drove his instruments to that cinderblock clinic. He still fasted. But now his fast had hands and feet.

Within a year, three other dentists joined him. An oral surgeon started coming the second Friday of each month. The wait list, once eleven weeks long, dropped to two.

"I used to think fasting was between me and God," James told his small group one evening. "Turns out God wanted it to be between me and my neighbor."

Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line between the fast God rejects and the fast God honors. The Almighty isn't impressed by our hunger pangs or our pious routines. He is moved when we loose the chains of injustice, when we spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry. The fast that pleases God always ends up feeding someone else.