Spam Again …

photo credit: Gauravonomics

For some strange reason, I had a few spam-free days when I moved my blog from a subdirectory to the main directory of my Web site. In the previous two years, Akismet had caught 97,000+ spam comments. Then for a day or two i had zero spam comments!

Then the spam started coming again—a trickle, a stream, a river, a flood. Now, a month later, Akismet has caught 10,000+ spam comments. 10,000 in one month! During the same time, I’ve had about 500 legitimate comments—20 spam comments for every real comment.

The bulk of the spam can be classified as porn, pills, and plagiarism …

Porn: Ads about perverted sex are wasted on a person who openly expresses her Christian faith and values on the blog.

Pills: If the pill purveyors only knew of the adverse reactions I’ve had from prescription medicine they’re trying to sell without prescriptions, they would know there’s nothing for them here.

Plagiarism: Perhaps the thing that amazes me the most are those spammers who plagiarize earlier comments—or even my post! At first, these were hard to catch because they showed up on old posts with lots of comments. But now I’m getting comments that repeat a sentence from my post within minutes of posting.

Thank heavens for Akismet. I’ve been checking comments in spam to look for legitimate comments. A few of my regular commenters end up in spam—I don’t know why, but I try to catch them. But skimming through hundreds of spam comments each day is time-consuming and very unpleasant, and I may stop doing it. If your comment doesn’t appear, e-mail me and I’ll look for it. Otherwise, I may miss it.

Can anyone explain to me why in the world spammers spam?

Comment Spam, Do Follow, Keyword Names, and You

I’m pleased with the number of insightful comments this blog gets, and I appreciate comments from diverse readers from around the world.

As my comment policy specifies, first-time comments are moderated; after the first comment is approved, future comments from that person are not subject to moderation. In theory, at least. Recently Akismet, which generally does an excellent job of catching spam and not blocking legitimate comments, has blocked comments from regular commenters. I usually delete spam comments without looking at them, so it’s possible that some valuable comments have slipped through and been deleted. If you have commented before and your comment doesn’t appear immediately, e-mail me.

If you haven’t commented before, your comment won’t appear until I have approved it. If your comment hasn’t appeared within 24 hours, you can contact me.

However, if you leave a comment that says “great post,” “now there are more reasons than ever to comment,” or any other comment that doesn’t even indicate you’ve read the post, expect it to be deleted. The first time, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and delete the comment; if it happens again, the comment will be marked spam and any other comments you leave will go into spam.

This blog is a Do Follow blog, which encourages comments. It also attracts spammers. If you come here to comment because you want a link that search engines will follow, I’m happy to have you … IF you read the post before you comment and leave a comment that says something. If the comment is so generic it doesn’t relate to the post … that’s a different story.

The most egregious case of inappropriate commenting started with a comment I approved. The comment related to the post, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary so I approved it. The next day that person left about 15 comments—all of which posted immediately because the previous comment had been approved. The first comment I read sounded familiar so I read through all the comments on that post, only to discover that a comment left by another person had been copied. I checked all the comments, and all were duplicates of other comments. The comments were made on older posts with a lot of comments to make it more difficult to catch. Since they were copied from relevant comments, they were appropriate for the post and seemed like legitimate comments. In fact, they were legitimate comments from the original commenter—but plagiarized by the spammer. I marked all the comments, including the first one (which had also been copied though I didn’t recognize at first), as spam. So now we have spam and plagairism in the same comment!

Commenters we bloggers love. Spammers are not welcome.

I do appreciate all legitimate comments, and I reply to every comment. I like to address the commenter by name, but I won’t address someone as California Liposuction or Timbuktu Real Estate. I will approve and reply to the comment, but I’d much rather respond to Susie of California Liposuction or John @ Timbuktu Real Estate. Note: This policy has been changed. Now I automatically send comments with keywords only in the name field to spam. Including keywords with your name is fine—you get a keyword link, and I know I’m replying to a real person. I have a hard time relating to Fat-Burning Miracle.

If you are a blogger, what is your comment policy? If you comment on blogs, what do you think of my comment policy? How do you feel about using keywords rather than names?

My Olympic (Festival) Experience

With the Olympics dominating TV, “proud sponsor …” and “official sponsor …” ads abound. Every time I hear those words, I’m reminded of my own experience as a  “proud sponsor of the Olympic Festival.” I have a framed photo and a framed poster hanging on my office wall as souvenirs.

If you’ve read this blog for even a short while, you probably know I’m not a sports fan. You’re likely surprised that I would have any Olympic experience and may not even know what Olympic Festival was.

I had never heard of Olympic Festival until one day in 1991 when a representative of the Olympic Festival ’93 called on me to ask my interior landscape company to be a sponsor. For several years ending in 1995, the Olympic Festival was held between Olympics, a sort of mini-Olympics for US athletes competing to be on the US Olympic team. 

We were asked to provide plants to decorate the festival venues. Business was good, I liked to support the community, and we had two years to prepare. So I said “yes” and became an “Official Sponsor of the Olympic Festival”—based on the value of our contribution, LIllie’s Plantscapes was a “Key Supplier.”

By 1993, circumstances had changed. I still wanted to support the community, but business had suffered from my absence while recovering from a stroke. We were short on preparation time since planning for this event had dropped to the bottom of the priority list when my staff focused on business survival during my absence. I was still in a wheelchair and easily fatigued, making it more difficult to manage large projects. Then we discovered that not only did the Festival organizers want green plants (which we could use later) for decorations, they wanted hundreds of blooming plants (which would have to be discarded after the event), increasing our out-of-pocket costs tremendously.

Nevertheless, we had made a commitment and were determined to honor it. The Olympic Festival treated it sponsors very well. We were given a great deal of publicity, invited to breakfasts and other events where we were given gifts (such a leather-bound diary/calendar featuring all the Festival events), and given private tours of the venues. That VIP treatment made participating in the Festival fun and exciting, but it didn’t alleviate the financial and labor strains we incurred.

Fortunately, I had a wonderful workforce. Often we had to break down one venue at midnight, move the plants to another location across town, and set up by 6:00 AM. We were given several VIP passes—identification as a Key Supplier that hung from a chain and allowed us anywhere in the venues. Workers could deliver the plants to a venue, wander around behind the scenes and see the athletes preparing to compete, watch the event, then go back to work.

We created a schedule that covered all the indoor events—the outdoor events used nature rather than our plants for decoration—and asked staff to volunteer for specific venues so they would have a chance to see their favorite sports. We even allowed office personnel to work as laborers so they could participate in the Festival as well. Although some events were more popular than others, we managed to schedule all the workers for events they wanted to see and cover all the events. Sometimes we had crews setting up plants in a number of venues around town at the same time … and we were still taking care of hundreds of clients’ plants on a regular schedule.

Everyone in the company spent an intense, stressful ten days ensuring that plants were in place to decorate the venues on time—even when events ran late and caused a rush to get the plants to the next venue. Every staff member was proud of the company and thrilled to participate in the Olympic Festival, which was a huge event for San Antonio. The thousands of dollars and hundreds of manhours of labor it cost us were well-spent.

Even though I’m not a sports fan, I couldn’t miss this opportunity to see performances by athletes who might become Olympic champions so I attended some of the gymnastics events. I found this video on YouTube of some of these events. Shannon Miller, performing here, went on to win a number of gold medals in the next Olympics and is the most decorated American gymnast in history.

You can even see some of our plants in the background early in the video!

Remembering My Parents

Five years ago today, my mother departed this earth to join my father in Heaven, where he had resided for more than eight years. Today, I still thank God regularly for the blessing of being born to these two remarkable people.

By the standards of the world, they never accomplished much. Neither had more than a high school education until Mama trained to become a Licensed Vocational Nurse after the youngest children were in high school and the others had left home. Daddy ran a small farm, but for many years he had to supplement his income by working as a rural letter carrier, a.k.a. mailman. I never realized we were poor until I learned I was eligible for financial assistance for college because we were below the poverty level.

Yet Mama and Daddy were two of the smartest people I’ve ever met, and, more importantly, the kindest, most generous, and most loving. Their world revolved around their six kids. They had high standards for behavior and school performance, and Daddy wouldn’t hesitate to enforce his standards with a spanking. However, I – and I believe all my siblings – were less concerned about being punished for misbehavior than seeing the look of disappointment on my parents’ faces.

Daddy was born on the farm he grew up on, and he lived there his entire life except for three years in the Army and the last few years of his life in a nursing home. Mama was born in California and moved around with her parents who were migrant workers. When she was in high school, she moved to Utah to live with her grandmother after her grandfather died.  She and Daddy met while Daddy was stationed in Utah in the Army.

After the war, Mama left her family and her Mormon religion and moved to Texas to marry Daddy and join his church (Methodist). Just a little over nine months later, I was born, the first of six children. They raised their children, worked their farm, befriended their neighbors, and served their community together for nearly 50 years.

They were simple, unassuming people, but they both had a wonderful sense of humor. You can see their proud smiles in this photo with me as a tiny baby, but the camera didn’t catch Daddy’s mischievous grin that he characteristically wore.

Daddy loved walking through the farm checking on the cattle he knew individually. When I was growing up, south Texas was going through a terrible drought. Daddy found a way to keep going. He couldn’t grow crops or raise cattle, but he discovered that caged chickens didn’t need rain … so he went into the egg business with 20,000 chickens. After the drought ended, he went back to farming crops and cattle.

Patients in the hospital and nursing home loved Mama because she was sweet and thoughtful. She worked for many years as a nurse’s aide before training as a nurse, and in both capacities, she cared for the emotional needs as well as the medical needs of her patients.

Daddy was a whiz at math. He could work any problem in his head, but he couldn’t tell you how he arrived at the answer. As a kid, I used to test him.

“How much is 1,392 times 847?” I’d ask as I punched the numbers into a calculator.

“1,179,024,” Daddy would answer before the calculator processed the problem.

“How did you know that?” I’d ask when the calculator agreed with him.

“That’s just what it is,” Daddy would say.

Mama loved to read and do crossword puzzles and word games. She always had a novel or two along with several puzzle books and pencils handy.

When I was in high school, I was president of the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) Subdistrict (a group of several churches in a small geographic area). Back in those days, churches, like everything else, were segregated. I was invited to speak to the MYF at a black church in San Antonio (nearly a hundred miles from the rural area we lived in). I was thrilled at the invitation but was flabbergasted at the response when I told my parents and asked them to take me. 

Daddy said, “I’m not going to any n- church.”

I think my mouth must have dropped open in shock. I had no idea my father was prejudiced. He did business with and was friendly with many Hispanics at a time and place where there was a lot of prejudice against Mexicans, as Hispanics were called then. There were no black people anywhere around where we lived, so Daddy wasn’t prejudiced against blacks from personal experience. It seemed to be just “the way things were” back then.

My mother, on the hand, was completely different. When she was a child, her father had become very ill and the family couldn’t afford a doctor. A black family in the migrant camp, who must have been just about as poor as my grandparents, helped them out. So my mother had a totally different reaction than my father. She may well have talked to him in private about his reaction, but she would not have done anything he didn’t agree with.

But the thing I so admired about my father was that in spite of his own prejudice, he didn’t pass it on to me. He didn’t forbid me to speak to the black youth group. He even drove me the nearly hundred miles to attend. However, he wouldn’t get out of the car. He and Mama drove around and around until I was finished.

I don’t remember any details of the event except that I was very happy about it. But I will never forget how my father helped me do something he couldn’t bring himself to do because he knew he was wrong (though he would never admit that).

No one on either side of the family had attended college, but all of us kids took it for granted that we would go to college. I’m sure my parents must have worried about how that would happen, but they never discouraged us. All four of the girls eventually earned college degrees, though two dropped out of college and returned much later in life. The two boys had technical training and have gone to professional careers in real estate and technology. This picture is our family the year I left for college.

During my first year of college, my family’s house caught on fire in the middle of the night. Mama woke up smelling smoke and herded everyone outside, though one of my brothers kept trying to get back in bed and go to sleep. Daddy managed to get in and rescue a few business records from the file cabinet in the front room, but then the fire was too hot to save anything else. Everyone sat in the front yard watching the house burn while they waited for the volunteer fire department to arrive from the town seven miles away. Daddy looked around and counted kids.

“There’s only five kids here,” he screamed. “Someone’s missing.” He started to run back into the house, now an inferno in full bloom.

Mama had a hard time making him understand that I was away at college and not in the burning house.

The rest of the family had only the night clothes they were wearing. Everyone in the family wears glasses, and all the glasses burned up in the fire. My parents and siblings spent the rest of the night at my grandmother’s, just a few hundred yards away on the same farm. The next morning, when the school bus stopped at the end of the lane, someone (maybe my grandmother) notified the bus driver that the children wouldn’t be going to school because of the fire. That afternoon, the bus stopped again, this time filled with clothing and household goods that the townspeople had donated. For several months, the family lived in the “egg house,” the building that was used to grade and pack eggs for market. Daddy bought an old frame house, moved it on to the farm, and renovated it for the family’s new home.

My folks didn’t let that fire—or any of the other difficulties they encountered in life—shake their strong faith or change their positive, kind, and loving personalities.

I will always be grateful for being blessed with their love, faith, and nurturing.

More on Magical Thinking

I didn’t intend to write a series on magical thinking. I planned just one post on the subject, my entry in What I Learned From People. However, this has been a learning experience all on its own. Because I used words that many people consider positive in a negative context, my message apparently didn’t get through to a lot of people. Perhaps the following little joke will put magical thinking in context.

A man of faith, Sam, answered a knock on his door to find a sheriff’s deputy standing on the porch. “Sir,” the deputy said, “the dam has broken and the river is flooding. Come get in my patrol car, and I’ll drive you to safety.”

Sam answered, “Thank you, but God will take care of me.”

A little while later, the floodwaters had reached Sam’s house and were starting to cover the porch. A man arrived in a small rowboat. “Sir,” he called out, “I’ll maneuver my boat right up next to your porch. Jump in the boat, and I’ll row you to safety.”

Sam answered, “Thank you, but God will take care of me.”

Some time later, the water had reached the second floor, and Sam was watching the rising river from a bedroom window. Two men appeared in a much larger boat. “Sir,” one called through a megaphone, “We’ll pull the boat up beside the house and toss you a rope ladder. Grab the ladder and climb down into the boat, and we’ll take you to safety.”

Sam answered, “Thank you, but God will take care of me.”

Soon the floodwaters had filled the house, and Sam was standing on his rooftop. A rescue team arrived in a helicopter. “Sir,” a rescuer called through a bullhorn, “we’re dropping a line. Grab the line; we’ll pull you up into the helicopter and fly you to safety.”

Sam answered, “Thank you, but God will take care of me.”

A short time later, Sam was washed away in the flood. When he came to stand before the Lord, he said, “God, I’ve been a man of faith all my life. I put all my trust in you. I knew you would save me. Why did you let me drown?”

“Son, I sent you a car, two boats, and a helicopter. What more did you want?”

Sam didn’t recognize his salvation in the ordinary people and tools of rescue. He expected God to work a supernatural miracle to save him.

In the same way, the man who expects the government to provide him financial security doesn’t recognize the seeds of his security in the entry level job he disdains because it’s menial work at low pay.

In the same way, the cancer patient who wants healing doesn’t recognize God’s healing hand in months of chemotherapy or radical surgery but wants an instant and miraculous cure.

In the same way, the writer who wants to become a best-selling author doesn’t recognize editing and revising and proofreading as early steps in the road to bestsellerdom but thinks her first draft should be good enough.

Magical thinkers rely on supernatural powers rather than the power of hard work. Magic can happen … but I don’t think any of us can count on it!

Can you remember … or imagine … life without spell check or life with a manual typewriter?

Recently, a client sent me a document to edit that was filled with spelling errors that should have been caught by spell check. I sent my client a note offering to help her new assistant turn on automatic spell checking.

A few days later, I was working on a new document for the same client. I typed a word and realized I had misspelled it … but there was no squiggly red line under the word. Was it right? No, it looked wrong, but Word said it was correct when I manually checked the spelling. So I looked the word up in the dictionary, and it was wrong. Maybe there something wrong for the listing of that word in Word’s dictionary. So I typed another misspelled word … and another … and another. Word said all were correct. I typed gibberish. Word said it was correct. I opened all the other Office programs and typed the same gibberish and spell check put squiggly red lines under every “word.”

Thus began a three-hour process of researching and experimenting to correct the problem. I read Word help and checked all the settings. I logged into the Microsoft forums and tried the numerous suggestions for spell check problems. I changed settings and edited the registry and rebooted the computer after each change. Word still told me my gibberish was correctly spelled.

Finally, I came across a message that sometimes a “bad” add-in can cause a problem with spell-check. So I decided to disable add-ins one at a time, then see if spell-check worked. When I opened Add-ins and looked at the drop down menu to manage add-ins, I saw a selection for Disabled Add-ins. I opened Disabled Add-ins and discovered spell check was disabled! Word said the add-in was disabled because it caused a serious problem the last time it was used. I don’t recall any “serious problems” with Word – and I’m not likely to forget “serious problems” – but whatever happened, the problem is solved!

Spell check can be easily misused and abused. I continually see words that are spelled correctly but are the wrong word for the context because the writer accepted Word’s spelling suggestion. However, I know much time it can save and how much it can improve accuracy if used correctly.

That thought led to the memory of the typewriter. There wouldn’t be nearly as many writers as there are today if we still used manual (or even electric) typewriters.

Several years ago, I transcribed my mother-in-law’s life story from tape recordings she made. I had helped my mother with her story (which I’ll talk about in a few months in a series on writing memoirs and family histories), and my husband and I had encouraged my mother-in-law to write her own life story. She finally agreed to talk into a recorder if I would transcribe the recordings.

After I typed the manuscript, we took it to her to edit, especially to be sure I spelled unfamiliar names and places correctly. She asked how I wanted her to mark the changes. When I told her to just mark the manuscript pages, she said, “Oh, I don’t want you to have to re-type the whole page for a small error!”

She had used the same manual typewriter since her college days in the 1920s. She had never used a computer and was amazed when I told her I could make the corrections on the computer and print out a new manuscript.

Jack picked her up and brought her to my office to spend the afternoon while I was making the corrections. Cut and paste amazed her. She kept saying, “I would have had to re-type the whole thing to move things around like that.”

That experience gave me a new appreciation for the computer and word processing. It also gave me a wonderful visit with my mother-in-law and lovely memories years after she is no longer with us.

[tags]spell check, computer problem[/tags]

What Do You Think of Weekly/Monthly Roundups, Themes, and Link Love Posts?

As I read blogs, I notice an increasing trend in certain kinds of posts.

Some blogs have a weekly or monthly roundup drawing attention to some of the posts on their blog. I look at the headline and click away from these posts. If the topic interested me, I read the post when it first appeared. If I didn’t read it then, I’m not going to read it now just because it’s listed in a roundup of posts. Of course, I realize new readers find blogs all the time, and these roundup posts might be helpful to them. What do you think about writing a post at the end of the week or the month linking to earlier posts on your own blog?

Other bloggers post roundups with links to posts on other blogs they found interesting. Lisa Gates at Design Your Writing Life and Liz Lewis at My year of getting published have recently linked to a post on this blog, and Matt Keegan at The Article Writer regularly publishes link love posts. I enjoy link posts that include a few links related to a particular subject, especially if there is information about why the link is worthwhile instead of just a list. I’m less apt to pay attention to a long list of links, especially if the links don’t seem to be related in any way.

Some bloggers make it point to thank everyone who commented on their blogs in the past month. Sharon Hurley Hall at Get Paid to Write Online and Jeanne Dininni at Writer’s Notes are among those who thank their commenters. This is a nice gesture, and I want those who take the time to time to comment here to know how much I appreciate them. However, I don’t want to just copy someone else’s good post idea.

Then there are themes and regular features. Joanna Young follows a monthly theme at Confident Writing. Yvonne Russell hosts the Weekend Writers Cafe at Grow Your Writing Business. Mig at Pamil Vision’s eWritings posts on Blogs to Read, a group of blogs related to a specific topic. Laura Spencer at Writing Thoughts features a different blog “Of Note” each week. I don’t think posting a feature on a regular schedule is how I want to blog, though I enjoy all of these as a reader.

I would like to post one series each month. I enjoy focusing on a particular topic - such as self-publishing, POD, news releases, e-books, and others I’ve done in the past - and covering it in more depth over several days. I’d like to know what readers would find interesting. What topics related to writing, editing, and publishing would you like to learn more about?

Share what kinds of posts you like by making a comment.

[tags]blogging[/tags]

A Word of Appreciation

I received the link to the While You Can Movie in a newsletter from Mr. Positive – a brief daily dose of motivation, encouragement, and positive thoughts.

The movie inspired me to take a moment to thank YOU for reading my blog, commenting, and giving me support and encouragement. The response to my request for advance readers for my upcoming book amazed me. Your posts on your own blogs and your comments here enlighten, entertain, and encourage me.

So today, I pause to say …

What Does Labor Day Mean to Freelancers?

Labor Day was first observed in 1882 by the Central Labor Union of New York to create a holiday for workers and to celebrate trade unions. Cities and states began to recognize the day, and, in 1892, the US Congress designated the first Monday in September for the annual observance of Labor Day. The recognition of Labor Day demonstrates the power of organized labor, especially a hundred years ago. Parades and picnics are traditional Labor Day events.

Jim Blasingame, the Small Business Advocate, points out in his newsletter every year that there is no Small Business Day, even though “small businesses account for about 75% of new jobs created in the country,” according to the Small Business Administration. About half of all employees work for small businesses.

The government’s report on small business for 2005 (released in December 2006) states:

…of the nearly 26 million firms in the United States, most are very small—97.5 percent of employer and nonemployer firms have fewer than 20 employees. Yet cumulatively, these firms account for half of our nonfarm real gross domestic product, and they have generated 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs over the past decade.

But what about those of us who are self-employed? The same report indicates:

The estimated number of nonemployer firms also reached a new high, at 19.86 million.

That means that two-thirds of small businesses have no employees. Freelancers fall into this category. Writers and designers often think of themselves as creative rather than entrepreneurial. However, to be successful, we have to be both.

My guess is that many of us will be working at least part of this holiday weekend. I hadn’t intended to work, but I have a client – a self-employed consultant – who has a big project starting next week, and she needs my help in preparing the training materials for her workshops. So she’ll be working … and I’ll be working while workers employed by small and large businesses will have a day off.

However, even if we’re not honored with a national holiday, and though I’ll be working at least part of the time on the holiday, I am delighted that I am a freelancer and not an employee. Maybe I work a lot harder and longer than I would if I reported to an 8-5 job, but I do it by choice. I have the freedom to tell my client I’m not available if I want, or I can do the work for her between midnight and 5 AM if I prefer. And if I choose to take off later in the week or next week, I can.

I give thanks every day that I do what I love and have the freedom to choose when and how it – even who I work with. There may not be a national holiday to celebrate self-employment, but, to me, every day is a day to celebrate.

Whether you’re a part of organized labor, an employee who isn’t a union member, an employer, or a self-employed freelancer, have a blessed, happy, and safe Labor Day.

[tags]Labor Day, self-employment, small business, holiday[/tags]

You May Never Know the Impact You Have

A recent post – Remember to do something for others – at Acquire Wisdom and Live with Passion got me thinking. Sometimes it seems that we need to do something great to have an impact on the world. What little I can do seems so … little.

Yet, sometimes the smallest thing can make a huge difference. A few days ago I met with a friend who had a stroke more than a year ago. Since neither of us is able to get out much, it was the first time I’d seen her in person since her stroke. At one point in our conversation, tears ran down her face as she said, “You’ll never know how much it meant to me to be able to talk to you when I was in the hospital and rehab. No one else understood what I was going through.” All I did was chat on the phone and acknowledge I’d had similar experiences and feelings when I was in therapy. Such a little thing … but so important for my friend.

And sometimes, we can influence someone we don’t even know. When I was in the interior landscape business, I visited the offices of a new client, an insurance agency that occupied an entire floor of a class A office building. I had negotiated the contract with the purchasing agent and had never met the president of the company. When I came to the president’s office, I introduced myself and told her I was there to check on their plants. She said, “You don’t it, but you have been a big inspiration to me.” What? I’d never met the woman before, hadn’t even known her name before I entered her office. She went on to say that she had been a stay-at-home mother of a disabled child until her husband died several years earlier. She put her adult son in a residence for persons with disabilities and took over the company her husband had spent his lifetime building. She happened to attend a Chamber of Commerce seminar where I talked about starting and building a business in a time when I was often the only female and one of the youngest people at business events. I frequently spoke at business functions, and I didn’t even recall the specific occasion she mentioned and certainly didn’t remember seeing her in the audience. That program, this successful insurance woman told me, inspired her, and when she was discouraged and frustrated with business challenges, she would think to herself, “If she could do it, I can do it.”

A simple word of encouragement to a friend or a stranger can impact their lives in ways we never know.

Related Posts: Catalyst: God’s Tool

[tags]giving, helping, encouragement, making a difference[/tags]

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