Become a Lamplighter
Light someone’s path
Tomorrow, someone will find Hope Healing Words on a day that’s harder than anyone around them knows. Your gift helps God’s word reach them, and the next person who needs it, sometimes on the very morning they need it most.
Devotionals, prayers, and Scripture · Free for everyone, always
7 Lamplighters keep Hope Healing Words free.
A monthly gift turns hoping the bills are covered into knowing they are.
Less than a dollar a day.
PayPal is not loading. An ad blocker or a privacy extension will sometimes stop it. Turn it off for this page, or write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
PayPal would not take that just now, and it is my end that is wrong rather than yours. Nothing has been charged. Write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
Through PayPal. No account needed, a card works.
Stop a monthly gift yourself, any time, without asking me.
One gift, whenever you feel like it, with nothing to cancel afterward.
PayPal is not loading. An ad blocker or a privacy extension will sometimes stop it. Turn it off for this page, or write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
PayPal would not take that just now, and it is my end that is wrong rather than yours. Nothing has been charged. Write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
Through PayPal. No account needed, a card works.
Someone is looking for hope right now
It might be a nurse at the end of a double shift, or a father sitting in a parked car, not ready to go inside. It might be someone who has not prayed in years, typing does God still hear me into a search bar at midnight.
Most of them will never tell anyone. They will find a verse, a prayer, a few lines that remind them God has not let go of them, and they will make it to morning.
In a world this loud, where it is hard to know what to trust, those words stay the same.
The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God stands forever.
Isaiah 40:8 · World English Bible
76,986
people were sent this morning’s.
Has a word here ever found you at the right time?
A verse on a hard morning. A prayer when you had no words of your own. If something here reached you like that, it came to you freely, and it is meant to be passed on the same way.
Freely you received, so freely give.
Matthew 10:8 · World English Bible
I still write them the same way I wrote the first one. I read the passage before I write anything, then I put down what it said in the plainest words I can find. Some mornings that takes twenty minutes. Some mornings two hours, and in seven years I have never once been able to tell in advance which kind it is going to be.
Every reading here was read by a person, thought about by a person, and put up by a person who will answer for it if it is wrong. In 2019 that was not worth saying out loud. It is now.
What comes back
I read everything that arrives and I answer what I can. Most of it is one or two lines, and most of it says a version of the same thing: it came on the right day.
Not one of them was asked for anything, and not one of them knows who paid for it.
I am not good at this part.
I have counseled people through my church for fifteen years and never charged anyone a cent. I have written these for seven and never charged anyone a cent. Asking is not a thing I am practiced at, and I have never made a habit of it.
But the bill has grown every single year, for the best reason there is: every person who joins the list makes it bigger.
It stopped working the year the list outgrew one person’s pocket. Nothing else went wrong.
What it actually costs
No office, no overhead, no salary for me. Some of it arrives on the same day every month. Some of it arrives when something breaks.
$1,094/ month
See the breakdown
Sending the morning email to the list
Amazon SES. The big one, and it grows with the list.
$693 / mo
Keeping the mailing system working
Someone who knows what he is doing, paid when something needs doing. Averaged, because it arrives in lumps.
~$368 / mo
The server this site runs on
$28 / mo
Domain, backups, the security certificate
$65 / yr
Hope Healing Words is not a church, a charity, or a registered nonprofit. It is one person writing, with a website and a mailing list. A gift here is a gift: it is not tax deductible, and it buys you nothing that everyone else does not already get for free. There is no paywall and there never will be.
The Lamplighters
Join the Lamplighters
Lamplighters are the people who pay for this so that nobody else has to. A lamp needs oil to keep burning, and their gifts are what keeps it lit for whoever comes looking next. The name is not mine:
Your word is a lamp to my feet, and a light for my path.
Psalm 119:105 · World English Bible
Your name, if you want it
On the wall, with a line I write by hand. Or not at all, which plenty of people prefer.
No amount, ever
No figure appears beside a name anywhere on this site. Five dollars and five hundred read the same.
Stop whenever
A monthly gift is yours to cancel, in your own account, without asking me.
In someone’s name
Light a lamp in someone’s name
In honor of someone you love, like the person who first taught you to pray. Or in memory of someone you still miss. Their name goes up, yours underneath it, small, and the light it keeps burning reaches somebody new.
I ask for the name after you give, not before, so that nothing about a payment page has to carry it.
Someone will need this tomorrow.
Light a lamp tonight and it will already be burning when they get here.
Forty more and the year is covered, without me asking again.
Less than a dollar a day.
PayPal is not loading. An ad blocker or a privacy extension will sometimes stop it. Turn it off for this page, or write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
PayPal would not take that just now, and it is my end that is wrong rather than yours. Nothing has been charged. Write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
Through PayPal. No account needed, a card works.
Stop a monthly gift yourself, any time, without asking me.
PayPal is not loading. An ad blocker or a privacy extension will sometimes stop it. Turn it off for this page, or write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
PayPal would not take that just now, and it is my end that is wrong rather than yours. Nothing has been charged. Write to me and I will find you another way. thomas@hopehealingwords.com
Through PayPal. No account needed, a card works.
Can’t give right now? You’re still part of this.
- Pray for the people who will find their way here tomorrow.
- Send this morning’s reading to one person who could use a word of hope.
- Take the book. 40 Prayers for the Days You Have No Words is forty prayers for when you have none of your own, and it costs nothing.
It was free when you had nothing and it stays free. I have been the person with nothing.
Thomas
7 Lamplighters keep Hope Healing Words free.
Become the eighth