Fishful Thinking Thursday (& PSF) - Finding Meaning...

One of our family goals for this year is to make a better effort to serve in our community, and even get Abby and Noah in on the act. It's my hope that we can make at least a small difference in the life of someone else and that we can create some neat family experiences.

It's no wonder that this Fishful Thinking activity caught my eye as I was browsing around the site:

Finding Meaning
Ingredients: Optimism, Empowerment

The first, and most important, step in enhancing your family's sense of meaning is to think about experiences in the past that have felt meaningful. You can do this by sitting down and making an "It Felt Meaningful When" list. Ask each person in the family to share times when they felt that they were engaged in something meaningful and talk about what made it feel that way.

Here's what we came up with this afternoon (in the words of my kiddos) :

It felt meaningful "and nice" when...

• We made a blanket for kids at the hospital that need help.(Pat found a website for Project Linus and met the kids and me to deliver our no-sew fleece blanket to the local chapter yesterday. We talked about how a giving a new warm blanket to a child who is sick is like giving a great big hug and would help him/her to feel a little bit better. The Young Women at church made a couple of them too so we delivered those as well.)

• We donated t-shirts and tennis shoes for the kids in Haiti (through a drive at Abby's school).

• Abby: I did Jump Rope for Heart for kids with disease when their hearts don't work right.
  

(Abby drew this picture to give to her PE teacher. She has been so excited to raise money for this event and practiced almost every day to get better at jump roping. Anytime she found a coin lying around the house somewhere, it went straight into her Jump Rope for Heart envelope.)

I hope that these meaningful experiences will help teach my kids to have greater empathy for others, and, as a family, we will grow stronger and become better because of these opportunities. When you think about it, there are so many ways to make a positive difference in the world around us. We just have to make the effort to take advantage of them.

Done any Fishful Thinking this week? Link up!


And for more Photo Story Friday - click over to Cecily's place!

Hosted by Cecily and Amy