The Sidewalk That Nobody Fixed

For three years, the cracked sidewalk on Maplewood Drive forced elderly residents to walk in the street. The city had bigger priorities. First Baptist Church had bigger priorities too — a new sound system, a missions conference, a twenty-one-day fast every January.

Then Rosa Gutierrez tripped on the broken concrete and broke her hip. She was eighty-one. She had no family nearby. She lay on the pavement for forty minutes before a jogger found her.

When Pastor David Chen heard about it, something in Isaiah 58 hit him differently that Sunday. "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?" The congregation had been fasting and praying for revival. But revival, it turned out, had been waiting three blocks away on a broken sidewalk.

That next Saturday, fourteen church members showed up with wheelbarrows and bags of concrete mix. They repaired two hundred feet of sidewalk. Then they fixed Rosa's porch railing. Then they started checking on every elderly resident within a half-mile radius — bringing meals, driving to doctor's appointments, replacing smoke detector batteries.

The congregation didn't stop fasting. But their fasting finally had hands and feet. Isaiah's ancient promise proved true: "Your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear." The light didn't come through louder worship. It came through a wheelbarrow and a bag of concrete on a Saturday morning.