The Grocery Run on Ash Wednesday

For three years, the women's Bible study at Redeemer Church in Tulsa fasted every Wednesday during Lent. They skipped lunch, gathered in the fellowship hall, and prayed through the psalms. It was beautiful, disciplined, holy work.

Then Maria Gutierrez mentioned, almost offhandedly, that the elderly residents at Whispering Pines apartments two blocks east had no reliable transportation to a grocery store. Some of them were eating cereal for dinner. Others were choosing between medications and meals. The nearest supermarket was four miles away, and the bus route had been cut in 2019.

That next Wednesday, the women still fasted. But instead of gathering in the fellowship hall, they drove to Whispering Pines with coolers full of groceries. They carried bags up stairwells. They sat at kitchen tables with people who hadn't had a visitor in weeks. Helen Park, eighty-three years old, wept when someone handed her a bag of fresh peaches.

The women kept fasting through Lent. But the groceries kept coming too — long after Easter, through the summer, into the fall. Other church members joined. A man with a truck started making pharmacy runs.

Isaiah 58 tells us the fast the Almighty chooses is not empty stomachs paired with closed hands. It is the fast that loosens chains, shares bread, and brings the wandering poor into shelter. The Redeemer women discovered what the prophet already knew: that when you feed the hungry, your own light breaks forth like the dawn.