Not long ago, I became inspired to make people and things better around me in a way that is rather unusual. It's about helping others, but doing so in such a way that they don't know who helped them. Someone told me a story not long ago about a married couple that were having difficulties making ends meet. One of them is an artist, and the other has a full-time job (but I don't remember what she actually was doing at the time). I actually don't even know this couple's names and I was removed from them by a degree of separation. Anyway each month they knew exactly how much money they had, and what they could spend down to the penny, and one month they calculated that they were running short by hundreds of dollars and some change. They never told anyone about their struggle, just that they prayed about it, and one day the seemingly impossible happened: They opened up a letter that was sent to them, only to find a cashiers check for the exact amount that they were going to be short for that month -- Right down to the penny! The people who told me about this knew the couple personally which added to the story quite a bit. At that time I'd been thinking about the concept of invisible hands . . . People silently, and invisibly working in the background to make other's lives better.

The goal here is not to collect donations or anything like that, but to create an exchange of ideas. Here's a good example. I know of a lady who's husband is not a legal citizen here in the US, but I wanted to change that. The only thing I could think of to do was to ask for advice from people that would know. So I found a non-profit that offers legal advice to people looking to become legalized, and called and talked with them. They would not talk with me about their options, and needed to talk with the couple in question. So my task was to get the contact information for this place to this couple. To conceal the fact that I had done anything I asked someone I trusted, who also knew them to give them the contact information, and not say anything about where it came from. In essence I used a proxy to conceal who actually found the info.

I felt somewhat rewarded, because I felt like I helped them. Later on I learned that it didn't help much because of some technicalities, so it got me to thinking abotu how I could have done a better job helping them. That's what this blog is all about. The idea is that I'd like to build up a large readership so that I can get comments and advice from you all about how to help. This multiplies the number of invisible hands involved.

Why the anonymity? I can't explain it. I guess I don't want to be doing this for the "thank you" or anything like that. There's a lot of need in the world, and people go on missions to far off places to help others. But there's so many people that need help right here in our backyards.