Kindness Ripples Outward

Today, while in one of the notoriously long lines in Wal*Mart, I was behind a man waiting for an elderly woman in front of him to unload her shopping cart and get a move on as he kept mumbling. She gets almost done and is $3.18 short to pay for her groceries. She gets really flustered trying to decide what to leave behind. Poor dear didn’t have very much to begin with. The man openly grumbled and swore so anyone could hear him. Finally I saud please move aside sir, he gave me a dirty look and stood his ground, so I said to the check out clerk, “here is a five, take out whatever she needs.” Everyone behgind me was now smiling but not the grump in front, he just growled and shoved past the poor woman as he paid for his bottle of guess what??? Yep, booze!!! Maybe he had the shakes. I helped the woman whose name was Betty outside but learned she took the bus and thats why she could only buy a few things at a time. So, I took her to Dennys for lunch and then to her home. I offered to pick her up every week and take her shopping with me… I now have a new friend.

Charleen (Chatty) Micheles, USA

It was a grey and chilly morning somewhere at a beach near the Mediterranean Sea in Italy. A woman was running along the shore, not only to do her workout, also to find some calmness and fresh air at the seaside. At some distance she saw a couple walking hand in hand, and apparently enjoying the clear morning at the ocean too. When she passed them they greeted each other with a smile. She continued running and a few minutes later, with the couple already out of sight, she stopped. A car key which was lost in the sand had attracted her attention. She looked around her. However, there was nobody else around who could have been a possible car owner. The only people she had met had been that couple a bit earlier. Since it was early inthe year and not many people use to go to the beach at that time, she decided to give it a try anyway. Although where she had seen them was the opposite direction she was going, she ran all the way back, hoping to find thecouple again. After a while she did see them. When she reached them, she asked if it was their key she just had found. Instinctively the man checked first his trouser pocket and immediately realized it was really him who had lost his car key. Very happy and grateful she had found and brought them their key back, he said: “We had an angel with us this morning, thank you so much!”

Silke, Munich, Germany

I saw a woman talking to my neighbor holding a bike while I was walking my cat (yes, on a leash attached to a harness). We talked for a while and I discovered she rides her bike because she has macular degeneration in one eye and can’t drive well. She sounded pretty hopeless…she had just been to her MD who saw only progressive blindness in her future. I told her about my dad who has used an FDA approved energy healing instrument, an accuscope, to massage around his eyes and stopped the progression of this condition for 8 years, much to his eye doctor’s amazement. I got my mom to send a copy of the manual and I have a contact who deals in selling these instruments. I’ll ask him where the nearest chiropractor is with one of these accuscopes. Somehow, we’ll get her to that person for a weekly treatment to help her eyes heal naturally.

Margie Mulligan, USA

A woman walked onto the bus just after her water bottle had broken in her purse. She didn’t have time to run home to fix things because she didn’t want to be late for work.

An older woman with a large purse pulled out some paper towels to help her, and then a cloth grocery bag to put her things in. And some plastic bags to keep what hadn’t gotten wet from getting wet. Every time the younger woman came across another problem caused by the water, the older woman had something that could help.

Thanks to the kindness and generosity of this well-prepared lady, the younger woman got off the bus much happier than she’d been when she got on.

Bev

I’m not the most negative pessimistic person, but sometimes I really get to thinking- well, negatively.

This weekend while driving through a town about to start a parade I saw an elderly man trying to leave a driveway and a teenage girl walking down the sidewalk about to cross him when suddenly she stopped, started waving her arms and pointing at the ground.

I couldn’t figure out what in the world she was doing until the man started backing his car up. I looked down at the ground out my window and he had initially missed the actual driveway and would have rode right off the curb had she not pointed it out.

Nothing spectacular, worst case he would have messed up his alignment, but the fact that this girl would notice and then bother to point out this impending problem was, really kind of… nice.

Amanda