“I’m in a widows group at the Grand Prairie Campus, and I heard someone talking about the Men’s Brigade. I didn’t know what it was and when I found out it was a group of men who help widows with handyman work around the house, I asked if they could help me clean my gutters. My husband died seven years ago, and I can’t climb a ladder. They’ve needed to be cleaned since he died. Scott Daniels, who leads the Men’s Brigade for the Grand Prairie Campus, came over with his wife one evening to look at my gutters. We scheduled a time that weekend for the Men’s Brigade to come, but when Scott showed up on Saturday morning—the Saturday before Mother’s Day—there were 10 or 15 men with him. They did so much more than clean out my gutters. They worked for four hours fixing my fence, cutting down tree limbs and vines, raking leaves and mowing the yard, and they even put up security lights on the outside of my house.
One of them was a teenager and he asked me if he could come back to mow my yard the next week. I told him I would pay him to do it, but he has come to mow my yard every week for free. He’s even helped my 87-year-old neighbor with some yard work. My neighbor’s name is Jack Buchanan, and after the men left my house, he told me ‘Gayle, I’ve never seen anything like that in my whole entire life.’ I said, ‘Jack, that is God. God is serving through those men.’ I shared the Lord with Jack and the other men did too. In fact, all of my neighbors knew what those men were doing and why. They didn’t just clean a gutter. They fixed my whole house. It gets me in tears when I talk about it because it was such a blessing.”
–Gayle Benage