Friends, this year has been so hard, hasn’t it? It seems not a week goes by where there isn’t some unthinkable tragedy. From the devastating hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico, massive wildfires in California, to the horrible mass shootings in Las Vegas and now Texas, my heart is breaking over and over again. It’s hard to not feel overwhelmed and sad all the time.

Our family has been doing more volunteer work than normal, making hygiene kits for hurricane victims, participating in diaper drives, donating money and more. There are so many needs all over and often it’s hard to feel like we are making a difference at all….

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In late 2015 I was in a state of personal dishevelment (I wrote about it here). All 4 of my kids were finally in school full time and I was struggling with many things in my life…my weight, my job, the amount of “stuff” I owned, the empty house and my overall feeling of dissatisfaction with everything. For a normally overall happy person, I was really, really unhappy and I wasn’t quite sure what to do about it.

That same year, my son was going through confirmation at church, which required him to seek out and participate in a variety of community service activities. I found a local food kitchen that needed a few volunteers on a Saturday afternoon to “prep food”. Jacob and my husband went and spent the day peeling carrots, chopping vegetables, washing dishes and more. My teenager came home a changed person. He was bubbling over with excitement about the day he spent with “Kenny” (the man in charge of the kitchen prep team) and the work the Kansas City Community Kitchen was doing. I thought to myself, “If volunteering has my teenager this excited then I really need to check it out!”

Thus began my real love for volunteering. I grew up volunteering and actually had been volunteering weekly teaching school of religion to middle schoolers and working with kids at our local elementary school, but there was something about serving the homeless and underprivileged in our city that really changed my life. Growing up in a fairly sheltered small town and living a life full of love and happiness and let’s face it, privilege, I was shook to my core to see how inwardly selfish I had been to be dissatisfied with my life. I began volunteering once a week then upped that to twice a week and sometimes even three times a week because I knew that the work I was doing was of value and importance. I found purpose where I was least expecting it…inside a food kitchen in Kansas City Missouri. …

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Have you ever been overwhelmed by the time and effort it can take to change the world? You observe friends on life changing mission trips, organizations building shelters and schools, celebrities raising millions of dollars for those in need, etc. and you think “Wow, I’d really like to change the world but I just don’t have the                    (insert: time, money, resources) to pull it off.”

Friends, I’m here to challenge you to consider changing what you think it might take to make a difference in the world. Grand gestures are nice and do make an impact, but so can sharing small acts of kindness and caring around your own community. It doesn’t take a lot of time, money or resources to make a difference in the lives of others. We can make a huge impact by simply showing people that we #CareEnough thorough small acts. …

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