Here are a couple of stories that are bound to touch your heart:
After the Storm
Beverly Jordan witnessed an extraordinary act of generosity after Hurricane Andrew slammed into South Florida in 1992, leaving a wide path of destruction in its path. Jordan, a nurse, volunteered to go door to door in Miami delivering emergency relief. Her relief van pulled up to a house that was nothing but a shell.
She asked the young owners if they needed anything. “They said, ‘No, but can you wait a minute here?’ They came back out with a case of diapers and four or five bags of food and said, ‘Would you please give this to somebody who needs it worse than we do?’”
Jordan says she never got the couple’s name and wishes that she could thank them for their generosity.
A Mother’s Good Example
Sometimes witnessing a good deed leaves a lasting impression. Donna Delfino Dugay of Harper Woods, Mich., remembers a day in California when she was 11 years old, and her parents took their six children for a special day at the beach.
Donna’s mother brought a picnic lunch — fried chicken and her famous potato salad—and prepared a plate for each of them. “When I looked up from my plate, my mother was fixing one more plate... She turned away from us and walked over maybe 20 or 30 feet to where there was a man by himself. And he was picking his way through the trashcan. And my mother — I don’t know whether she just put the plate there or whether she touched him gently or whether she said a few words — but I remember him turning to her in a gesture of thankfulness.”
Dugay’s mother came back and sat down at the table. Years later, Dugay asked her mother if she remembered the incident. “She laughed and said, ‘Not at all.’ But for me, I remember it very well because for me, it was the touchstone for what good deeds became in my life.”
‘A King’s Ransom’
Peter Strupp of Boston remembers being “flat broke” his senior year at the University of Wisconsin. When he could no longer afford the rent at his fraternity, he found refuge in an on-campus student house.
“Inevitably the month came that I couldn’t make the rent for my room at the student house either. The night before I was going to tell my housemates I was leaving, one of them stopped me in the kitchen. We were alone... He reached into his pocket and handed me a month’s rent, in cash. Before I could say anything, he said, ‘Don’t pay me back.’ Though the rent was less than $100, Strupp writes, “in a dark hour, it was a king’s ransom.”