Last week the ItStartsWith.Us team tried out a new kind of mission. We wanted to find a person online who seemed to be going through a rough patch in life, and let him or her know that there are people out there who care about them.

The idea behind this type of mission is to amaze someone with the generosity of the human spirit and the kindness of strangers. They may be going through a really tough situation, but if they get a massive love bomb dropped on them by hundreds or thousands of people from all over the world, they’re going to remember this time in their lives not only for the pain they endured, but also for the love shown to them and the increased hope in humanity they will gain. And who knows? Something like that could change a life.

So last week I asked our team if they knew someone we could do this for – preferably someone writing about their experience on a blog so we could all leave a comment. I received dozens of submissions from team members, and I spent four hours myself searching the web for someone to help. I finally settled on a gentleman named Bill who was back home visiting his mom during her last week of life. He wrote a post on his blog about the difficult day he was going through trying to interact with his mom with the knowledge that she was slipping away. I’m not going to provide the link to his blog post right here, because it was a very vulnerable and personal moment in his life, and I don’t want to make a public example out of it.

What I will tell you, however, is that we found a way to do something very meaningful for him, and it was beautiful to behold. During difficult, emotional times like these, most of us don’t want others all up in our face about things, but at the same time, we do want to know that we are heard, understood, and cared about. So I just encouraged our team to simply leave an encouraging and comforting comment for him to read when he logged back in the next time.

We dropped over 200 comments on his blog that day – it was amazing. They ranged from small notes of comfort to touching personal stories of love, loss, pain, and ultimately joy. When I went back to check the post and see what the team had done, I hit the down arrow, and the page scrolled for over a minute. There was no way I could read them all. I did some quick calculations, and found that if each person who participated spent a total of five minutes to read his post and leave a comment, then we spent over 16 hours on his site that day, listening to him and providing support. I am humbled and honored to be part of a team that can do something like this for a stranger.

I was brought to tears by the overwhelming response of our team . . . and so was Bill. The next day he wrote a thank-you post, updated us on what he had done with his mother that day, and in the last line told us that the day we left all the comments had been his birthday – and he’ll never forget it.

Bill’s mom passed away two days after we did all this. In his final blog post on the subject, Bill once again told his readers how much all the kind words meant to him.

Once a month (or more often if there’s interest) the ItStartsWith.Us team is going to do something like this for a stranger. It’s incredibly easy and incredibly meaningful . . . a perfect way to help us accomplish our mission of changing the world. If you’d like to join us on this project, just put your name and email address in the box below. No spam, no hassle, no pressure. Signing up here just puts you on the list to receive any new bombing missions, and does NOT put you on the larger ItStartsWith.Us team (although you will have an opportunity to do that if you want). *NOTE TO CURRENT TEAM MEMBERS – The larger team will still be doing a shared Love Bomb mission once a month, but if you want to do more, you should sign up below, since this subgroup will operate independently.

We all come together for a brief moment in time, we flash a huge amount of love, then we disappear. Love Bomb.

Who’s in?