Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today I want to honor a man, a man with a heart after helping others. This man wasn’t trying to be in the spotlight, he just had a heart after God and for showing God’s love to others. He tried to live by Matthew 25:40 and in the twenty years that I knew him, he did. The verse shows us how we should help others as if we were helping Jesus Himself. The man was named Sandy and he was a kind, gentle, patient and compassionate man, always ready with a smile, a handshake and an encouraging word. When having lunch with him one day, I overheard the waitress say something to Sandy and found out that he had paid for the dinner of some military service members he had seen in the restaurant. He didn’t want them to know it was him. He just wanted to brighten their day and thank them for their service. Another memory I have of Sandy is from a few years ago when it was almost Christmas. We wanted to get something special as a pr...

  Some call this the season of lights. With all the lights and decorations, I can see why. Today I'm going to talk about another kind of light.   I don’t usually talk about just one website at a time in my blog. I give lots of websites that have great ideas or provide my own ideas and inspirations. But today, there is a website I want to talk about because it does A LOT! The Points of Light website caters to individual volunteers, companies that want to make a difference and to nonprofits as well. Individuals can find volunteer opportunities, causes and programs set up for them.   Nonprofits can post volunteer opportunities. The Points of Light Civic Accelerator “invests in and supports seed stage social ventures that solve pressing social and environmental issues by engaging people” also. If you have an idea for a nonprofit, this is the place to be, with money, mentoring, peer support and networking for your idea. Or, if you have a company that wan...

    May is lots of things—the gateway to summer, the last full month of school, the month of flowers after April showers—but also it’s national foster care month. I know some foster care parents and have shared their stories before, but not all of us are able to be foster care parents. So, I want to share some things that we can get involved in to help foster kids without being a foster parent. The first one is Together We Rise. What I like about Together We Rise is that it started out of a real need. Danny Mendoza had a cousin who was living on his own. Danny couldn’t find a way to help because he was told he was too young. He decided to start his own charity that could help children in foster care while mobilizing young people to make a difference in the world. Through its fundraising and network of passionate volunteers, Together We Rise gives foster children a brighter future and a sense of normalcy and belonging. They provide bikes, sports camps and simple...

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...

There’s a new way to do Lent, not give something up but add something new. I heard about it from Karen Ehman of Proverbs 31 ministries . I had decided this year to add a new morning and evening prayer for the 40 days of Lent and then I heard of Karen Ehman’s idea of Reverse Lent. Ehman suggests doing one of five things: 1.        Writing a note each day to tell someone thank you or share a memory. 2.       Call someone each day to tell him or her you’re glad he or she is in your life. 3.       Do something to lighten someone else’s load. Help a family member, friend or coworker by doing a chore that is usually theirs. 4.       Help a stranger. 5.       Serve someone who usually serves you, like the postman, a teacher or pastor.   I think it’s a great idea! Everyone is talking about what they’re giving up and I absolutely ...

I cried so much doing the research for this week’s blog. I guess that’s nothing new. My husband often sees me with tears running down my face as I work on my blog. It’s usually a mixture of sadness and happiness at what happens in this world that causes it.   Have you heard about the 26 acts of kindness that NBC News Host Ann Curry suggested people do in honor of each person who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School? She started out just suggesting people do 20 acts for the kids, but everyone wanted to do something for each person who died.   If you want to see some examples of what people are doing and her explanation of how it all happened, visit the NBC News page about it . I think it’s such a fabulous idea that I had to mention it.   I also found out about a local mother who started her own random acts of kindness initiative.   Were your kids bored over the Christmas holiday when they were out of school?   Courtney Fell’s two boys were, too...

How does it start? Anger, lack of control and lashing out at someone else. One in four women and one in nine men will experience domestic violence in their lifetime according to the Centers for Disease Control. Five million children are impacted by domestic violence each year and two hundred seventy five million people are impacted worldwide from domestic violence according to Childhood Domestic Violence Association . Can you imagine what it’s like to live in constant fear of violence? Or maybe you know what it’s like from personal experience. It’s not pretty. Long-term effects of domestic violence on women who have been abused may include anxiety, depression, death, health problems, malnutrition, panic attacks, suicide attempts and an inability to adequately respond to the needs of their children according to findcounseling.com. Those children suffer, too. They suffer s hame, guilt and self blame, fear of abandonment or expressing emotions, anger and depression. Children of do...

Last Friday was World Arthritis Day and honestly, I wasn’t sure what to say about it. Arthritis is a condition that affects more than 46 million U.S. adults—a number that's expected to increase to 67 million adults by the year 2030. But I’ve not had a personal experience with it until I became friends with a lady at my church who has arthritis. She asked people to wear blue on World Arthritis Day and then I asked her if she'd like to be interviewed! There are more than 100 types of arthritis but rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is the most common type of inflammatory arthritis. More than 1.3 million Americans are affected by RA. According to the American College of Rheumatology, about 75 percent of those affected are women. In fact, between one and three percent of women are likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis in their lifetime. So, it’s appropriate that my friend is a woman. Her name is Melissa Maxey and here is her story. 1.        How long have you h...

Next month there are two days to remind us of people who are often forgotten—the homeless. In 2011 there were 636,017 people homeless in America. World Homeless Day is October 10 and World Habitat Day is October 1. In honor of these two days, I am featuring an interview today with Angela Smith. Angela is the author of two books End of Mae and No Money Marketing , and the writer of popular blog Dandilyon Fluff . However, Angela also experienced being homeless on and off for five years from 1986 to 1991. As someone who pulled her way out of homelessness, she is an example of how the system works and how it doesn’t. 1.       How did you become homeless? I became homeless as a runaway at 16.  At first I stayed with random friends but when that hospitality ran out my only choice was to live directly on the street. The first night I was wandering around in the dark confused on what to do next. A carload of teenage guys starte...

Dear God, I often wonder what you would have me do to help others. It sometimes seems like I can’t help someone who really needs it, for how does that person find me? And even if he did, how could I truly help in the all ways he might need it? Providing food and money only helps with physical needs when spiritual needs can outweigh those. Someone in the grips of despair has emotional needs, too. You say that pure religion is caring for widows and orphans. That lets me know that caring for others is important to you, but I don’t have enough money to support another family. Or do I? One thing that I have found is a way to pool my money with others by sponsoring a child through a group like Compassion International or World Vision. These organizations take the monthly amount I send them and combine it to provide services for many children in one area. The wonderful thing is I’m not just providing for someone financially whom I’ll never know. I can write to my child and hear ...

This year if you were to visit a class of 40 students, on average by the end of the year ten of those 40 students will have dropped out of that school. In a school of two thousand students, that would be five hundred dropouts. Frightening numbers, aren’t they? General Colin Powell founded America’s Promise Alliance over a decade ago. In 2010, America’s Promise launched the Grad Nation campaign to fight back against the dropout trend.   According to the America’s Promise Alliance website: Grad Nation is a large and growing movement of dedicated individuals, organizations and communities working together to end America’s dropout crisis. Grad Nation goals include achieving a 90 percent graduation rate nationwide by 2020, with no high school graduating less than 80 percent of its students, and regaining America’s standing as first in the world in college completion.Grad Nation is a 10-year initiative focused on mobilizing Americans to end the dropout crisis and ensure that youn...