My friend and mentor Rebecca Stay is serving a humanitarian mission with her husband in Europe for our church. She sends out updates from time to time on their goings and comings. Her e-mail last week really touched me. It’s so easy to look at the flaws of the church and religion in general. Many fall prey to the negativity and criticism that is so pervasive in our culture. And yet reading this list of the quiet ways the church is going about doing good inspired me. It was a reminder that I, too, can go about in quiet ways sharing the love of Christ through service. Here’s her e-mail:

Today we approved projects in 13 countries!

1. Medical supplies for a Roma clinic in Albania

2. In Cape Verde we are helping with a  fishing coop, outfitting a school kitchen, supplying school kits to adult learners, remodeling a school bathroom, and providing computers to a school where currently 6 students all use ONE computer during their computer class (they only have 5 computers for a school of 1600.

3. Purchasing beds for a men’s drug rehabilitation home in the Czech Republic which was damaged by the spring floods.

4. A German ward wants to provide poor Eastern European children with hydrocephalus with the expensive medical shunts needed for surgery.

5. In Greece we are providing supplies to a homeless shelter

6. In Cyprus, we are helping furnish a new hospice

7. In Hungary, we are buying industrial clothes dryers for a disabled children’s home

8. A Relief Society, a Young Men’s/Young Women’s group, and the YSA in Hungary are going to make 100 blankets to donate to hospitals, children’s homes and other agencies.

9. In Macedonia we are rebuilding 4 sets of stairs which have all been broken and unusable in a home for the elderly and donating 130 blankets, one for each patient.

10. In Moldova, a school with 400 students will receive a bread slicer (150 loaves a day), a potato peeler (100 lbs a day), an oven, a water heater for washing dishes, and a food processor to cut up 75 lbs of vegetables a day.  Currently, all this work is being done by hand.

11. Flood victims in Romania received thousands of pounds of food and small cooking stoves.

12. We will connect 3 schools and 250 families to municipal water in a city in Bosnia

13. The 575 inhabitants of a Roma community in Slovakia currently walk ½ mile with buckets of water from an old hand pump.  We will help with the drilling of a well and piping the water into homes.