In these remarkable and diverse essays, you will share an umbrella with a monk, root for a prisoner serving a life sentence for murder, cheer on the efforts of an elderly woman struggling to learn to read and write, scrub down a bathroom for “colored” in the 1950s segregated South, and play a memory/listening game with the elderly.

You will cry for the Soviet victims of nuclear testing, hold the hand of a dying woman at a hospice, and rock a starving child in Haiti. You will trek into the deep woods of the Ozarks and encounter a night beetle, and feed a cat in an low-income housing project. You will give your shoes to the homeless and toil in the backroom of a 19th century English book bindery.

You’ll play Joseph in a Christmas pageant and ride through the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

And more.

$100,000 August Turak, Raleigh, North Carolina
Brother John

Brother John is the true story of how the author’s contemplative retreat at a Trappist monastery turns both magical and terrible when a simple monk offers to share an umbrella on a cold and rainy Christmas Eve. This simple act of loving-kindness proves almost more than he can bear, and becomes the catalyst for a gut wrenching re-evaluation of life, love, and the terrible yet fascinating nature of God.

$50,000 Dr. Mitch Abblett, Newton, Massachusetts
The Face Collector

A combat veteran has carried a heavy burden of pain and guilt since the Vietnam War. In the years since the war, he has found atonement and a mission in life through his work as a photographer, and through teaching others about the power of caring, empathic contact with others.

$50,000 Dr. Alan Hirshfeld, Newton, Massachusetts
How Wonderfully We Stand Upon This World

In 19th-century England, an unschooled bookbinder named Michael Faraday overcame almost impossible economic and class obstacles to become the greatest experimental scientist of his time. Faraday sought to understand the natural world in the belief that the revealed knowledge would nourish the collective soul of humanity. His legacy is nothing less than our own technological society.

$50,000 Leslie Larson, Berkeley, California
Grace

Grace tells the story of a seventy-four-year-old woman who struggles to learn—not only to read, but to write. And not just to write, but to write poetry. Her patience and perseverance overcome a barrage of obstacles—including the fading enthusiasm of her twenty-something year old tutor.

$50,000 Struan Stevenson, Girvan, United Kingdom
Crying Forever

Crying Forever is Struan Stevenson's moving account of the people he met in Semipalatinsk in 2003- people the Western world would largely have forgotten- the true victims of the Cold War - in the area of East Kazakhstan where the Soviets carried out over 600 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1990, using the half million local population as human guinea pigs. Stevenson's essay explores the daily life of these communities, their suffering, pain and sense of hopelessness as they struggle to survive in a polluted environment.

$25,000 Randall Frame, Wayne, Pennsylvania
Fixing Haiti

A young man's encounter with a child at risk of starvation leads to a new realization about life's priorities. This account is based on the author's one-week experience in Haiti in the mid-1990s.

$25,000 Fruma Klass, Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania
Streets of Mud, Streets of Gold

The time: a hundred years ago. The place: a “Fiddler-on-the-Roof” kind of town, but in its squalid, starveling reality. The family: intent on coming to America, with no money, no resources outside themselves, and only an overwhelming sense of purpose to direct them.

$25,000 Elizabeth Orndorff, Danville, Kentucky
The Bathroom Cleaner

My story was inspired by a column by Merlene Davis in the (Lexington) Herald-Leader which told of the Colored Women’s Clubs of the 1930s through the 1950s in Lexington, Kentucky, one of which “maintained” a bathroom in a beauty shop for use by colored folks who were downtown shopping and had no other place to go.

$25,000 Stephen Pimentel, Annandale, Virginia
The Natural Order and the Human Mind

Mankind has always seen order within nature, leading to the belief that nature itself is purposeful. Some modern philosophies rejected this belief, holding instead that nature may be ordered, but not purposeful.However, contemporary advances in physics and biology have discovered order within nature on the deepest levels, an order that is governed by laws consistent with purpose.

$10,000 John Casteel, Traverse City, Michigan
The Skating Rink

The Skating Rink is a fictional story of a mentally disabled man who finds his purpose—and earns his town’s love and affection—through his job clearing the ice on the town’s skating pond and encouraging generations of children as they learn to skate there, although he himself never did.

$10,000 Carol Franks, Portland, Oregon
What Ever Happened to Chris Olsen?

What Ever Happened to Chris Olsen? is a personal essay exploring the implications of one man’s need for good neighbors and public health care coverage. The thesis is that there are “too many Chris Olsens? in the United States, people who are living on the margins of poverty in situations that can, ultimately, cost them their lives. What Ever Happened to Chris Olsen?” is among a set of essays in a manuscript exploring great losses that are often overlooked.

$10,000 Dr. Stan Goldberg, San Francisco, CA
Fixing? Helping? or Serving?

The care provided for the dying is neither altruistic nor depressing. It is one of the most enlightening and life-changing events one can experience. Lessons for living are given just by being compassionate and present. This essay relates an experience the author had with a woman in hospice who struggled with letting go of life. Rather than dying and ending her suffering, she waited until her mother was prepared to accept life without her.

The experience the author had with this woman and the others he has served led him to have a greater understanding of life. As one approaches death, there are few superfluous agendas. Being continually involved in the experience of dying, is the greatest teacher one can have for living. All you have to do is listen.

$10,000 Kenneth Hartman, Lancaster, California
A Prisoner’s Purpose

After spending most of my life in prison it became clear to me that change was needed. I had worked long and hard to change myself; through this process I became convinced that I had an obligation to work for the betterment of the world I inhabit. The Honor Program at the California State Prison in Lancaster is the product of this awakening desire to become a force for the good. I set myself a seemingly impossible task, motivated by a desire to do something worthy of the life I have; changing the world’s largest prison system from inside one of its cells. The Honor Program remains an ongoing struggle, but a struggle worthy of pursuing, worthy of the effort. Purpose, and the power that emanates from purpose, can change even this world of violence and despair.

$10,000 Bennett Johnston, Sausalito, CA
Listening to Purpose

This is a thought-provoking essay that explores the power of sharing our personal stories and of listening deeply to others. It underscores the vital role that all of us, especially our elders, can play, in creating communities of vision and purpose, through sharing our life stories and personal memories.

$10,000 Lisa McMann, Mesa, Arizona
The Day of the Shoes

Christopher, a former executive, trudges through snow on a mission for shoes. Six hundred miles away, Gloria, a homeless single mother of three teenage daughters, has responsibilities that seem endless. Christopher is motivated by passion, while Gloria is motivated by survival. Together, these two unlikely friends strive to create compassion in the lives of the indifferent and hope in the souls of the homeless.

$10,000 Esther North, Gibsons, British Columbia, Canada
Who Will be Joseph?

When you're planning a Christmas pageant it seems that no one wants to be Joseph. Life is a lot like that: few of us want to stand in the background and give center stage to others. Who Will Be Joseph? is the story of a man whose rich, largely hidden life was, like Joseph's, motivated by love that lead him to unexpected destinations and decisions. The story is told by his grandaughter who grew up following him around a prairie farm, listening to his stories, and learning to see the wonder of God in all things.

$10,000 Diane Pleninger, Anchorage, Alaska
Footprints of Purpose

In the course of poking about as an amateur mushroom enthusiast, I happened upon the story of an extraordinary fungus. A rust called Puccinia has developed a survival strategy that is fascinating, complex and gives every appearance of being purposeful. About that time, I learned of a call for essays on the topic of purpose. I thought that the story of Puccinia might serve as an introduction to a meditation on purpose, and especially on human purpose.

$10,000 C. Kevin Smith, Big Sur, California
The Stone Bird

A stone sculpture gives shape to a love of beauty, a knowledge of
suffering, a dream of flight.

$10,000 Doug Wesselmann, Walnut, Iowa
The Goodness of Trees

When a scarred and traumatized young man returns from combat under the deadly trees of the Mekong River’s Nine Dragons region in Vietnam, he searches to find his purpose in the world. He seeks answers in a small isolated monastery among the quiet trees of the Ozark Mountains, where he finds lessons are often taught in silence and in song. A hermit, a night beetle, and an ungrateful little girl lead Vincent to the healing he needs and a realization that changes his life in a single sentence: “I am here for you.”