The Fast That Walked Outside

Every January, First Community Church in Decatur, Georgia, held a three-day prayer and fasting retreat. Members gathered in the fellowship hall, sang worship songs, journaled, and prayed earnestly for revival. Meanwhile, across the parking lot, a single mother named Maria worked double shifts at the laundromat, unable to afford winter coats for her two kids.

One year, a new associate pastor named David canceled the retreat's afternoon session. "Put on your shoes," he told the congregation. "We're going to fast differently today." He led them door to door through their own neighborhood — the one most of them had driven past for years without stopping. They met Maria. They met Mr. Henderson, eighty-two, eating cold soup because his furnace had broken in November. They met a teenager named Josiah sleeping in a car behind the gas station.

By sundown, the church had bought coats, fixed a furnace, and opened their empty parsonage to a young man with nowhere to go.

David read Isaiah 58 aloud that evening: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice... to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?"

No one in that congregation thought about fasting the same way again. They discovered what the prophet had been saying all along — that the worship the Almighty desires has always had hands and feet.