The Women Who Winterized Garfield Avenue

In January 2019, during the polar vortex that dropped temperatures to thirty below in Detroit, a group of women from New Bethel Church realized something that shamed them. They had been holding weekly prayer vigils for their neighborhood — candles lit, hymns sung, hands raised — while three elderly residents on Garfield Avenue were sleeping in homes with broken furnaces and plastic sheeting over their windows.

Deaconess Marlene Thompson said it plainly at the next church meeting: "We've been fasting and praying with the heat on. Mrs. Odom has been fasting because she can't afford groceries and a gas bill in the same month."

That weekend, twelve women showed up with caulk guns, weather stripping, and space heaters borrowed from their own bedrooms. They sealed drafty windows. They called the utility company and negotiated payment plans. They stocked three refrigerators. By February, they had formed what they called the "Broken Wall Brigade," adopting one block at a time — fixing porches, clearing code violations, sitting with neighbors through benefits paperwork.

This is exactly what the Lord declares through Isaiah: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice... to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter?" The Almighty isn't moved by our beautiful worship services alone. He is moved when His people step out of the sanctuary and into the cold, becoming what the prophet calls "repairers of broken walls, restorers of streets with dwellings."