Pay It Forward

I foolishly try to pack too much into one day…so at 4:30 on Friday afternoon I set off for Wal-mart, perhaps the busiest place on earth and at the busiest time! Pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong on this visit. I spent 30 min. in customer service line, lost my extremely detailed grocery list and had to search the store for it, spent forever looking for 2 obscure items for 2 new recipes, and to culminate it all when I set out to the car at 6:00, it now being dark, cold, with Reagan tired, and hungry, I realized I had left my lights on, and with the battery drained, my car wouldn’t start. I stood there holding a crying Reagan about to start crying myself looking, around for someone to help. Having just bought a new car we hadn’t moved the jumper cables from my Honda to this car. The people I asked didn’t have cables either. I walked into Wal-mart (who now aren’t allowed to jump your car with the box b/c of liabilities?????) searching for someone to help me. I saw a man in a sheriff’s uniform… "Aw, safety.” I thought.

He was obviously off duty, now on the cell phone with his wife, carrying a huge box of diapers, with 5 young boys waiting for their dad to come home, when I desperately approached him. He was so kind. He acted as if it was no problem at all to help me. He drove his truck over to my car. The problem was my car was barricaded in with cars so the cables couldn’t reach. I realized how utterly clueless I am: I couldn’t find where to pop my hood (it is a new car to me) so he did it, he told me to switch my car into neutral, I couldn’t do it so he got into my car and did it for me. Then he single handedly pushed my car out into the lane as I just stood there watching. He connected the cables got my car running and was off.

After an extremely rough evening I couldn’t help but be happy because I was full of such gratitude for a man who so willingly and capably helped me in a time of need.

When I got home and recounted the story to Will he said, “Well, what he’s name, I want to send him a Thank you note for helping my wife and daughter?” Can you believe after all of that I didn’t even ask his name?

So I write this post in gratitude to an anonymous servant with the determination to in turn “pay it forward.” What I mean is, I hope we all, when people so generously serve us, will stop to take the time serve someone else. “Pay it Forward!”