The Wall That Rose in Seventy-Two Hours

In 1900, a hurricane flattened Galveston, Texas, killing over 6,000 people and leaving the survivors standing in a graveyard of splintered wood and salt-crusted rubble. Engineers declared the city indefensible. Politicians urged abandonment. But the people of Galveston refused to leave.

They devised an audacious plan: raise the entire city seventeen feet and build a massive seawall along the coast. For seven years, workers — dockmen, shopkeepers, schoolteachers, German immigrants, Black laborers — jacked up more than 2,000 buildings on wooden screws and pumped millions of cubic yards of sand beneath them. They poured concrete for a seawall that stretched over three miles. No single person could have lifted a house or mixed enough concrete. But together, with calloused hands and a shared refusal to surrender, they rebuilt what the storm had destroyed.

Nehemiah knew this kind of holy stubbornness. When he surveyed Jerusalem's broken walls by moonlight, he saw what everyone else saw — charred gates and heaps of rubble. But he also saw what God intended. And when the people set their hands to the work, scripture tells us the wall reached half its height because "the people had a mind to work." Not extraordinary skill. Not superior resources. Just ordinary people with an extraordinary willingness, laboring side by side because they believed the God who called them to build would not abandon them in the building.