Randa Ragland was struggling to deal with her problems, and to top it all, she began to get messages in the mail criticizing her yard.
“I opened it and it was pretty much [the sender] shaming me for my yard,” Ragland said. She was accused of not caring about her home, and that “your eyesore is affecting the resale value of our homes,” and that she needed to “do better.”
She acknowledges that initially, she was upset about it, but then with everything going on with her and her family, she did not have the necessary energy to get angry. Her entire focus was on her family and especially her 3-year-old son, Jaxen.
“He’s autistic and he’s non-verbal,” Ragland said. “But, a few days before his third birthday is when he was diagnosed with neuroblastoma stage four cancer.” Ragland said Jaxen must have been hospitalized over 20 times and had about seven surgeries.
She even shared a letter and Jaxen’s story on Facebook in an attempt to encourage her neighbors to be nice and considerate to her and her family. “My whole point was to show people you don’t know what somebody’s going through,” she said. “Kindness goes such a long way. Gratitude goes such a long way.”
The following day, a beautiful thing happened: a lawn care service showed up at her house and cut her grass without saying anything.
Soon volunteers got together and some went to the store to buy supplies for her family, others grabbed chainsaws to tidy up her home. All of them were rank strangers to Ragland. “Look at this! This is love,” said Joey Harding, one of the volunteers. “This is love for a stranger. We don’t even know these people.”
Harding has also had hardships; less than two weeks ago, his six-year-old daughter LuLu went tragically from the same type of cancer as Jaxen. “Words can’t describe what this means to me right now,” Harding said. “It’s helping me. It’s helping me cope with losing my daughter. To help another family in need.”
The group helping Ragland has named themselves as “Jaxen’s Army for Justice,” and they said that they would support the family every step of the way.
“I’m in amazement. I’m still in shock,” Ragland said. “I don’t have a large family. My mom is gone, my dad is gone, my brother is gone, so this means a lot.”
This story gives us so much hope and belief in the power of community. Thanks to Jaxens’s Army For Justice, Randa Ragland and family have received the much needed assistance and support they require at this time.
