Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

Tomorrow starts National Park Week, a week to get out and visit a national park, for free! Sunday is the day to celebrate Easter, and it's also a perfect time to simply get outdoors and take advantage of the more than 17,000 miles of trails in national parks and another 15,600 miles of national recreation trails. God's creation is made for us to enjoy! Did you know there are more miles of trails in the national trails system than miles of road in the interstate highway system? Search here for events going on this week at national parks. Next Saturday is also National Junior Ranger Day for young visitors to "explore, learn, protect" and be sworn in as junior rangers. We have visited a few national parks in our time and there are always programs going on for Junior Rangers. There’s even a site for Web Rangers. Tuesday, April 22, is Earth Day, so if you want to roll up your sleeves and pitch in with a project, look for a park where you can help out...

Ever feel helpless? When a friend is very sick, you may feel like there’s nothing you can do. It’s not true. You can always pray for someone and prayer can change things. There’s another thing you can do. Get some help for your friend. Recently, a friend of mine was sick. She was self aware enough to know she’d have trouble cooking so she asked me to have some of our friends make her some meals. I did so gladly. Thank God it was just a temporary illness and she was back on her feet in a few weeks. Sometimes that’s not the case. In those cases, there’s a lot to do. Take your friend to the doctor, help with laundry and housecleaning, watch the kids while she rests or is at the doctor, give her primary caregiver a break. The list goes on. So, how do you coordinate what needs to be done with the people who can do it? You can spend all your time on the phone calling and setting things up. Or, you can use Lotsa Helping Hands . What is Lotsa Helping Hands? An online service...

How do you get thousands of students to raise $37 million and volunteer over nine and a half million hours to change the world? Ask Craig and Marc Kielburger. They’ve done it and it’s called We Day . We Day is a one day stadium-sized event that brings charities and inspiring speakers together for thousands of kids who have already spent a year making a difference. Craig and Marc have shared the We Day stage with change-makers such as Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, Magic Johnson, Rev. Jesse Jackson and Larry King. This 2013-14 We Day season, there are 100,000 youth attending We Day events and 5.4 million people watching via broadcast. The Canadian brothers started the We Day movement that has done all of this six years ago but Craig founded their nonprofit Free the Children when he was 12. Free the Children “ has worked in over 45 countries since its inception, and has built more than 650 schools and school rooms in developing regions.” Along the way, Craig and Mark also star...