It is no secret that the neighborhood around Church at the Square often proclaims death. It continues day in and day out. However, God hears our cries. God lives among the suffering and dying. God is not content to let God’s people live in such squalor of body and soul.

On Easter morning at Church at the Square, we followed the Holy Spirit into an empty lot at the corner of Dawson and Jeffries Street, between CitySquare’s Opportunity Center and Austin Street Center. This empty lot, normally a place of drugs and despair, of violence and squalor, of exploitation and death, became an empty tomb. We stepped into the tomb to find that God had renewed it. Where there had been death, there was now life.