By Robert Kent

My morning routine is probably like many of yours: wake up, roll over, and pick up my phone. I pull up the day's headlines and prepare for my daily dose of anxiety. Even the weather report, once a refuge from the headlines, has gotten in on the act. And all this before coffee.

I work for a charitable foundation, where I lead a team that tries to find solutions for some of the biggest challenges facing our community in health, education, and public safety. Every day, I wrestle with the enormous scale of those challenges, the cost of addressing them, and the reality that there are never enough resources to meet every need.

When I feel overwhelmed, I often return to the words of John Wesley, the Anglican evangelist and founder of Methodism, who called on Christians to "do good: as we have time and opportunity, in every possible kind, and in every possible degree."

What I love about Wesley's exhortation is its recognition that although we can do good, we cannot do it all. But we should still try. And I suspect Wesley understood something else: acts of goodness and generosity rarely remain isolated. We see others doing good, and we are inspired to join them. What seems insignificant when done alone can become mighty when done together.

That matters because generosity is contagious. One person gives, another sees the example and joins in, and a mosaic of generosity begins to take shape. We saw that a few weeks ago on North Texas Giving Day, when over 100,000 of our neighbors and friends came together to support nonprofits across our community. Some gifts were large; others were as small as $1. But taken together, those individual acts formed an amazing portrait of generosity, with more than $78 million given to support our community.

I think that is part of what Paul is suggesting in his letter to the Philippians: "As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you." Our faith is not practiced alone. We learn generosity by witnessing generosity. We learn service by watching others serve. We learn to trust God by seeing that trust embodied in the people around us.

That is one of the gifts of belonging to a church community. When the morning news starts to get the better of us, and the needs of the world seem impossibly large, we can look around and see others quietly doing good, and then join them. Our individual gifts may sometimes seem small, but each act encourages another, adding another piece to the mosaic of generosity we create together. And together, by God's grace, we can do far more good together than any of us could ever do alone.