6Water on the Thirsty Land

This one is long — too long to photograph in a single frame, which is why we're giving you three more frames — and it's built like an illuminated manuscript that escaped onto a building. A ribbon of blue water winds the entire wall, and out of it grow trees from everywhere: a broad-leafed palm, a fruiting tree heavy with red, a gnarled old olive, a willow trailing its branches into the current. A dove crosses overhead. The words come from Isaiah — I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground — lettered in careful scribe's calligraphy, with the word for “life” tucked among the roots in language after language.

The building under the manuscript has its own testimony. This was an H-E-B once — a working grocery store, back when this corner fed its neighborhood. Then it went dark and stayed dark, and the years that followed were not kind: an empty building on an emptying block, in a 76707 zip code that came to carry the highest crime rate in the city. That is the wall the painters were given — the side of an abandoned supermarket, in the part of town the statistics had written off as dry ground.

Then Antioch Community Church did the thing the wall now describes. It didn't build across town and commute its compassion in; it planted itself here, in the dead grocery store, and started pouring. The building filled with people. The block began to come back with it, and then the neighborhood. Today the church that moved into an abandoned H-E-B sends life out of this corner to the rest of the city and, through the churches it has planted, around the world. So read the wall again, knowing that: it isn't decoration, and it isn't wishful. It's the building's own story, written on its skin — water on the thirsty land, streams on the dry ground, at an address that once defined both.

It is a quiet wall in a loud part of town, and it rewards standing still in front of it.