Sometimes a simple act of kindness that you might think is quite ordinary, can go a long way and brighten someone’s day or even their life. One such story involves a homeless man and a man who was just driving past him when he noticed he might need help.
David Lee Whitherspoon Jr. is volunteering as president of the food pantry at St. Mary’s Basilica in Phoenix, Arizona, while he also works full time at Phoenix Veteran Affairs. On a hot summer day, as he was driving home, he noticed a man crawling on the street. He immediately stopped his car and went to help him.
“I stopped my car. I didn’t even pull over,” he told ABC 15 Arizona. “I just saw him right away, so I got out and I asked him, ‘Sir, what’s wrong?’”
The man explained to him that he recently had a dispute at his last residence, which had rendered him homeless. Even worse than that, he had left the property in such a hurry that he didn’t even consider wearing his shoes, so he only had his socks on. However, with the temperatures in summer Arizona reaching the hundreds, he had to use his socks to protect his hands, so he had remained barefoot.
Whitherspoon didn’t need to hear any more. Due to the fact that he does many jobs himself, he always carries several pairs of shoes in his car, as he did that day. So, he went back to his car and a few moments later returned to the exhausted man with a pair of shoes and a bottle of water in his hands.
What followed was as if taken right from the Bible. Whitherspoon carefully washed and dried the man’s feet and then he slipped on the shoes. He didn’t mind if he was planning to wear these shoes during the day, what he knew at that moment was that he had to help another human being in any way he could.
“A lot of people give up on people now and that’s the biggest problem,” the Good Samaritan, as he has been called, told the news. “I mean, you don’t have to… empty your wallet or anything like that; just a simple, kind act.”
Many people have praised Whitherspoon for his generosity and kindness, but, according to him, he only did what anyone should have done.
Luckily, this is not the first time that homeless people have enjoyed a stranger’s generosity. Recently, a jogger in Manhattan not only gave a homeless person a pair of shoes, but he also offered them a job, while a few years back a West Louisville teenager offered a pair of shoes to a guy living on the street.
These acts of generosity and kindness remind us that our global society is not entirely hopeless and that there are still people out there who would go above and beyond to help a fellow human being in need.
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