Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

Do you ever feel like there are too many issues out there for you to make a difference? Believe it or not, I’ve felt this way before, especially with my knowledge of all the things going on in the charity world. For instance, last week, there were three different things I wanted to talk about—National Literacy Day on the 8 th , September 11 as a day of service, and National Suicide Prevention Week. If you “tuned in” last week, you know I settled on the latter. Why? Simply because I’ve written about the other two and hadn’t written about the third one yet. I felt like it was time. On the tenth anniversary of September 11, I definitely focused on that and as a former English teacher, I’ve written about literacy throughout the year. The two other issues are important to me. I buy my books from Better World Books because I know they give books to people that need them and provide literacy programs throughout the world. I also made brownies and cookies for my local firefighters on...

My life is wonderful. I have a loving husband, a growing child, and a variety of activities taking care of them, helping others, and stretching my mind and abilities. Most importantly, I love God and know He loves me. This was not always the case. When I was in my twenties, I had a hard time finding a good job (the economic recession of that day was in effect), no boyfriend, and I struggled to make ends meet and enjoy my life. After being thrown out of my parent’s house, I moved from place to place and job to job (neither by choice) for over a year. On top of that, I had been in a car accident and had recurring pain with which I dealt. At one point, I was so depressed with the way my life was going, that I considered taking my life. What brought me back from the brink of such an action was that I felt some connection to my nephew (who was a young boy at the time), and I knew that everyone in my family would be negatively affected by my act. The memory of his sweet face and the ...