Thursday, January 3, 2013

The Kindness of Others

I am blessed to know some amazing people. I mean, some REALLY amazing people.  How amazing? Let me give you some examples...

A friend of mine from high school was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. She eventually started a blog about it - Living with IBC. Check it out. You'll understand in no time why she's so amazing.  She's also a way better writer than me, plus she's flat out awesome as a person.

She wrote a post a few weeks ago that mentioned some things she realized that she'd never get to do. One of those things was to collect a magnet from every state.

One of the benefits of being in the military is that you end up knowing people that live all over the world. So I thought - hey - why don't I just see if any of my friends and hopefully my friends' friends would be willing to send her a magnet? So I posted on Facebook to try and get this thing going. I got a pretty good response, but I was still missing some states.

This brings me to my second amazing person. My brother-in-law, Eric, offered to buy her a set of magnets and send them. I mean, how awesome is that? So now she has a full set, plus the extras that are coming in from my Facebook friends. It makes me tear up that people are willing to help out someone they don't even know....just because. So to any of you that are reading this, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

The third amazing person I'd like to introduce you to? One of my favorite Zumba instructors, Doreen Warfield. She started a physical challenge for December that grew to over 1000 people. 1000 people voluntarily doing squats every day. That's impressive! To top that for January, she started a Facebook page called Endorphin it Forward. The physical challenge for January is sit ups but you join the challenge and pay (I think) $ . 15 a day for every day you actually do the challenge and $ .50 for any days you don't. At the end of the month, Doreen sends all that money to a charity, which will change each month.

My fourth amazing person I'd like to introduce you to is Laura Kelty. Laura is a friend I met while in Germany, and she just started a 31 day challenge called '31 Random Acts of Kindness". The idea is to perform one random act of kindness every day.  Laura is no stranger to performing random acts of kindness. This Christmas she organized an amazing Christmas for a group of orphans in Germany. And to her, that's no big deal.

My point in sharing all of this with you is that sometimes we all need a reminder of how many thoughtful, courageous, generous, kind, wonderful people there still are out there.  They are out there. And I'm going to try a whole lot harder to be one of them.

Happy New Year!

3 comments:

Nicole said...

That's awesome. Sometimes those reminders of how great your world is really brings you back.

Brooke said...

That is so true, Nicole. Thanks for the comment and Happy New Year!

bluecollarbean said...

And I can't thank you or your brother enough! What a wonderful gift that was! I have spent so much time looking up stuff about the states, re-arranging my magnets and just enjoying knowing that you think about me... Life is wonderful because of the awesome people like you!