Clean Water on Cypress Street

Every January, Grace Fellowship in south Memphis held a twenty-four-hour prayer and fasting vigil. The sanctuary would fill with worship music, the smell of candles, and earnest prayers for revival. But one year, a deacon named Marcus Williams walked home a different route and passed through Cypress Street, where residents had been hauling bottled water for six weeks because of corroded pipes. Children were bathing in water that ran brown from the tap.

Marcus stood in that sanctuary the next Sunday and read Isaiah 58 aloud. "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice?" He asked a simple question: "What if our fast actually cost us something beyond a meal?"

Within a month, the congregation had raised funds, partnered with a local plumber's union, and spent their Saturdays digging trenches and replacing waterlines on Cypress Street. They showed up in work boots instead of Sunday shoes. Teenagers who had never held a wrench learned to sweat copper joints alongside retired pipefitters.

The day clean water finally ran clear from those taps, an elderly woman named Ruth Henderson turned on her kitchen faucet and just stood there watching it, tears running down her face.