Kagawa's Six-Foot Room in the Shinkawa Slums

In 1909, a twenty-one-year-old Japanese seminary student named Toyohiko Kagawa walked out of his comfortable dormitory in Kobe and moved into a six-foot-by-six-foot shack in the Shinkawa slums — the most desperate district in the city. Beggars slept on his floor. He gave away his clothes, his blankets, his food, until he contracted trachoma from a man he had taken in and nearly lost his eyesight.

His professors thought he had lost his mind. The churches in Kobe held their prayer meetings and observed their fasts, but Shinkawa was not a place respectable Christians visited. Kagawa did not care about respectable. He opened free clinics, started labor schools, organized unions for factory workers who earned pennies a day. Over the next three decades, he helped build credit unions, cooperative farms, and orphanages across Japan. When asked why, he would simply say he was trying to live as if the Sermon on the Mount were true.

Isaiah 58 draws a sharp line between the fast God rejects and the fast God honors. The Almighty is not impressed by bowed heads and sackcloth if the hungry remain unfed and the oppressed remain in chains. The fast that moves the heart of God looks like Kagawa's shack — a life poured out so completely that light breaks forth like the dawn, and the ancient ruins begin to be rebuilt.