One such sad display took place a few Saturdays ago on the basketball court of the Helena,Ark. Activity Center, where short and terribly ungifted male athletes were mercilessly trounced by junior high Shaqs in the mocking fashion the Harlem Globetrotters would use to thrash the hapless Washington Indians game after game.

Up and down the court the gifted ones sprinted, weaving and dunking and speaking in codes the desk jockeys would not have understood had they been able to hear it over the pounding in their heads. After suffering numerous humiliating blocked shots and air balls, one of the old guys called it quits and dragged himself off the court, plopped down on the benches and gasped for air.

That guy was me. Under normal circumstances it would be quite rare to find me on a Saturday, or any day, playing basketball in one of the most impoverished areas in the country with some of the most talented young players in Phillips County, Ark.

To put it bluntly, I stink at basketball. My high school team was one of the worst in the school’s history -- and I was cut from it. I tend to panic and pass the ball to the nearest person, regardless of which team they play for or whether they’re even on a team. At 5’7” (and shrinking, it appears), my shots have extreme difficulty ascending all the way to 10 feet. After a few minutes of play, no one from the other team guards me because they understand that I am their best asset when I have the ball.

I didn’t travel to east Arkansas just to be made a fool of on the basketball court. That was merely a fringe benefit. I was there to do what you might expect someone with an undergraduate degree in journalism and a graduate degree in philosophy of religion to do: lay bricks in a garden.

Helena, Ark. is located in the middle of the delta on the western border of the Mississippi. In its heyday, the town was one of the main ports on the river. From the 1820s through the Civil War, two or three steamboats a day stopped at the port, loading and unloading everything from cotton to mail. Now riverboat tours stop to show people the remains of a once thriving riverfront area, like viewing T-Rex bones.

Other than the annual King Biscuit Blues Festival where hundreds of people flock to the city for a weekend, downtown Helena is mostly empty, the shops and storefronts long since abandoned and boarded up, given over to darker elements. Crime rates and unwed birthrates are some of the highest in the state, standardized test scores some of the lowest in the country. On this Saturday a few stragglers and passers-by dot the deserted downtown streets. And it is here, in the heart of this ghost town, in a vacant lot once littered with empty liquor bottles, that I toil. A group of local citizens, in partnership with visiting missionaries, has constructed a mini botanic garden, full of blooming flowers and fresh vegetables. I and a handful of twenty-somethings from my church spent the day in 97 degree Arkansas heat laying a sidewalk with bricks from torn down buildings.

The only other sidewalk on which I’ve had any substantial impact, besides walking, is one at my college alma mater. Somewhere amidst the miles upon miles of concrete on that campus, my name has been sandblasted into the “Senior Walk” among over 100,000 names of others who've graduated since the school's inception in 1873.

When I graduated from the University, and my name was etched into that sidewalk, fulfillment meant career advancement, fame and fortune. Well, maybe not so much fame, but I hoped for a good amount of fortune. I studied and worked hard to prepare for my vocation. I looked forward to the professional challenges ahead. Never in my wildest futuristic dreams did I imagine a day when I would be just as fulfilled, if not more so, to leave my mark on another sidewalk, one far removed from the University campus and all that my education represented.

Out there in the heat with those bricks, the last thing on anyone’s mind was my academic background or career achievements. In that setting none of that mattered. What mattered was that I was willing to get down in the dirt and work. Hunched over my section of sidewalk on my hands and knees, my neck stinging from the noonday sun, I meticulously placed one brick next to another, next to another, on and on for hours.

I can’t emphasize enough how this sort of detail work is not my kind of thing. I’m a big-picture guy. Leave the details to the accountants and computer programmers. I’m an idea man.

But there I was, happily sorting through hundreds of brick parts, searching for just the right fit for my little construction project. What’s weird about the whole thing is if you had pulled me away and asked me to do the same thing in my own backyard I probably would have burst into tears. You might as well ask me to organize my closet. But there in that place, bringing a small glimmer of light into so much surrounding darkness with my little brick placements, I couldn’t have been more content.

While we worked, locals shuffled in and out of a well-used liquor store just across the street from us. They couldn’t help but stare. This lot is where they used to drink. Another couple worked their way past us while engaged in a domestic dispute that had spilled out into the street. As they walked by their voices lowered as if having entered a quiet zone, then picked back up on the other side.

The local Christians there have a goal: they want to repair the “broken windows” that sociologist James Q. Wilson talks about. Wilson said if you don’t repair the first broken window, more destruction will follow because that's the expectation. Before long, brokenness is the norm and good people give up hope and move away. If you repair the broken windows, he said, and keep repairing them whenever they break, fixing the problems when they are small, then you deter the deterioration. You keep brokenness the exception, not the norm.

The windows have been broken for a long time in downtown Helena, both metaphorically and literally. But things are changing thanks in part to a committed group of local Christians who understand that once in a while faith requires getting a little dirt on your face. They’re building hope brick upon brick, plowing the field row upon row, hoping to one day reap a cultural, and spiritual, harvest. It was a great privilege to have a small hand in that process, and even though I didn’t get my name etched in this sidewalk, my heart will be there for a long, long time.