A funny thing happened on the way to saving the world...

As all of you faithful readers know, I have been embarking on an Oprah-inspired mission to save the world by writing a letter to someone each day for a month. Let me tell you how things were going at the half-way point in the project: stinky. Really stinky. Like, limburger stinky. You see, one of the criteria was that each letter should be sent to someone who wasn't expecting to hear from me, so I wrote letters to missionary friends I haven't spoken to in way too long, friends who (sadly) had to drop out of seminary because of particular hardships in their lives, people I used to work with who had been facing challenging times when we last spoke, etc. Writing the letters was no problem, but then they started reappearing in my mailbox - shocking amounts of them - stamped with messages like, "address unknown" or "forwarding expired" or some other cryptic postal euphamism for "you've-allowed-these-people-to-drop-out-of-your-life-and-now-you'll-never-find-them-again". So many were returned that I was becoming a bit dispondent about it. Cut to the chase: I quit writing the letters.

But then yesterday as I was rifling through my mail, I discovered a letter from someone I've never met before. In her note she told me that she is the daughter of a very good friend and she thought, perhaps, that I would like to know that she is praying for me. This simple note from someone I've never met was very dear and immensely encouraging and completely, completely unexpected.

And it changed my world.