The Laundromat on Franklin Avenue

Every Tuesday night, Maria Santos unlocks the doors of Spin Cycle Laundromat on Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis and puts up a hand-lettered sign: "Free Wash Night." By six o'clock, the plastic chairs are full — single mothers with garbage bags of kids' clothes, elderly men from the shelter on Third Street, a teenage girl who has been wearing the same hoodie for two weeks.

Maria doesn't preach. She folds. She hands out detergent pods and quarters for the dryers and listens to whoever needs to talk. Sometimes she brings rice and beans from her kitchen. The whole operation costs her about eighty dollars a week.

Her pastor once asked why she always missed the Wednesday evening prayer and fasting service. Maria smiled and said, "Pastor, I think I found my fast."

She had. Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line between the fast God rejects and the fast God honors. The rejected fast is all posture — bowed heads, sackcloth, solemn faces — while stomachs growl for show. The fast the Almighty chooses looks like Maria on Franklin Avenue: loosing the chains of injustice, sharing bread with the hungry, providing clothing for those who have none.

The prophet promises that when God's people live this way, "your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear." Maria wouldn't call what she does healing. But the teenager in the clean hoodie might.