There are a lot of ways to think about serving others. As a profession I spend my time helping high school and college-aged students discover why service is so important to our communities and to our own personal lives. The problem with how we often serve is that we approach someone who needs something as someone who is less than us. Even though this is very seldom our intention, its hard for everyone bearing witness to a server-served relationship to help from seeing that the power in the interaction flows from server to served.

So how then do we get around this? We remove pride from the equation. If you can't get recognized for your deeds than your only intention can be to serve because it's right. For me, while still serving in person alongside students, this can be difficult, but here on this site it's quite easy. We don't tell you who they are, but we do tell you what they do. We honor the actions, without any expectations that they will be recognized because of us telling their story. Our goal in this is to give everyone a gift: the gift we are giving on this site is the ability to see. The person is anonymous, you are anonymous, and therefore the relationship between you to is pure empathy. We don't want you to know who this secret person is, because our hope is that reading his/her story will lead you to recognize the secret people in your life and your community. We want to help you see all the secret people, not just the one whose story we've told here.

I hope you will make the most of this gift. And if you find a secret person in your community who needs their story told, let us know! We'd love to tell it.

Image used under creative commons license courtesy of Pete: http://bit.ly/1F3AQHB.