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What did the stranger do for you?

Fridgemagnetman

Fridgemagnetman

I only have one
V.I.P Member
She held my hand when I was lying face down in a field after crawling out of an upside down car.
I asked her name.
'Names don't matter' she said.

Can you think of a stranger, someone who you may have met only once, who may have had a big effect on you?
 
I met a lady after a conversation she told me happiness is more important then academic achievement and I shouldn't let anyone put me in a box
 
I was in San Diego (Mission Beach)
An old ragged black man sat down with me at a bench where I had just ate lunch...
I was sort of in a hurry, and about to get back to class.
I was figuring he needed money and was going to give him some...

Instead he told me a story about rushing through LIFE...
A story that changed my LIFE. Way too long to post here.
Basically he told me it could end in an instance just by not paying attention to when LIFE is trying to tell us something...
Wow, I just started getting all wet eyed thinking about it...

I pulled out of the parking lot and maybe 5 minutes earlier there was a massive accident
right where I needed to pull out on I5, and a fire was starting under one of the cars (it was horrible and had fatalities)
Not even emergency vehicles on the scene yet... Did he save my life that day?
I can't help but think yes.

After he left I had this strange feeling, just like I got right now thinking about it.
 
I had just wrecked my car off the side of the highway, it was laying on its side and looked pretty nasty from the pictures I saw later. I was entirely too concussed to figure out what i was going to do next, but then this girl stopped, waded out like 50 feet in the mud, helped me to her car and drove me to the hospital. Never did get her name.
 
Yep. I was in college and a lady in my class (whom I never spoke to before or after) came up to me one day and said she had a dream that I was found dead lying beside railroad tracks. I stayed away from railroad tracks for a couple of years after that.
 
I’ve lived in many countries and me and my family have been treated kindly by many strangers in all of them.

I think the most incredible one was the owner of an apartment that rented it to us, in spite of not having a job (she just asked for a regular deposit) and not even being legal in that country at the moment (my husband got a job a month later, and we got our papers ready to be legal residents a few months later, too).

In another country, we had just moved in, but the house didn’t have cable yet (at a time when internet was too slow to see movies or series). We went to a video store, planning to buy a movie for my two-year-old, but they only rented them, and we still didn’t have credit cards of that country yet. I was frustrated about it, and a random guy let me use his membership card to rent the video. I never saw him again.

In another occasion I was in a bus with my one-year-old in a stroller, and when we were about to get out, the doors started to close in on her, and I suddenly went mute (probably because their language was not my mother tongue) and someone yelled at the bus driver just in time for the doors not to close on her.

In another country we had a huge 8.8 Earthquake and we were too scared to go back to our apartment, so a neighbor that we didn’t know, offered us to spend the rest of the night in her mom’s house, which was near by. We stayed at that house until it was dawn.

Also, since I was holding a new born in my arms, was barefoot, and was wearing a thin robe (because we had just stormed out of the apartment as we were dressed) she and other neighbors gave me a sweater -it was very cold- slippers, a blanket for the baby, and even diapers.

Here in AC a complete stranger gave me a V.I.P. membership when I said I would have liked to get one to support the page, but that I couldn’t at the moment (we are not strangers anymore).

There’s many other stories. I know how important is a kind word, most of all when you are in a country that it’s not your own, and if you are carrying kids with you. I feel it’s my responsibility to Pay Forward all those random acts of kindness (like in the movie, where a person that receives a favor, does a favor to another person).

Every time I can, I do an act of kindness, not because ‘I’m kind’, I do it because I’m repeating what I’ve learned from the actions of so many people that have helped me out. It’s just the way it should be.
 
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Sabrina said:
Every time I can, I do an act of kindness, not because ‘I’m kind’, I do it because I’m repeating what what I’ve learned from the actions of so many people that have helped me out. It’s just the way it should be.
Click to expand...

I agree, I've been the stranger myself sometimes but the stranger would have to find this thread to post about me!
 
Chance said:
I was in San Diego (Mission Beach)
An old ragged black man sat down with me at a bench where I had just ate lunch...
I was sort of in a hurry, and about to get back to class.
I was figuring he needed money and was going to give him some...

Instead he told me a story about rushing through LIFE...
A story that changed my LIFE. Way too long to post here.
Basically he told me it could end in an instance just by not paying attention to when LIFE is trying to tell us something...
Wow, I just started getting all wet eyed thinking about it...

I pulled out of the parking lot and maybe 5 minutes earlier there was a massive accident
right where I needed to pull out on I5, and a fire was starting under one of the cars (it was horrible and had fatalities)
Not even emergency vehicles on the scene yet... Did he save my life that day?
I can't help but think yes.

After he left I had this strange feeling, just like I got right now thinking about it.
Click to expand...
 
It's weird how overall I have had a pretty okay life so far and my day-to-day interactions with strangers are usually positive, yet I cannot for the life of me think of one specific anecdote. Only the ones where strangers negatively impacted my life come to mind.
 
Fridgemagnetman said:
Can you think of a stranger, someone who you may have met only once, who may have had a big effect on you?
Click to expand...

I never met the tall young guy who was playing with a ball in the water, near where I was walking underwater on my way to some imaginary place as a toddler. I thought somehow I could eventually breathe under there. All I saw were legs coming towards me, and then arms pulling me up and out of the water into the light. Never knew who he was.


When I was the stranger:
I was with my father once coming home from the city. And saw fresh black tire marks on the side of the highway and in the turf, they went into a deep ravine. We stopped and I ran down into the ravine, in high heels, there was a man face down in the swamp. I turned him over, and he sputtered and opened his eyes. His car and everything inside it littered the ravine, even a tube of toothpaste had squirted open on impact, that's what I remember, the open tube of toothpaste and a ribbon of it. I pulled him out of the swamp, and held his hand as my father went to find a nearby phone to call for an ambulance. I never spoke, but he did, he said to my father, "You're a big guy."
 
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My first week of college, I was pretty overwhelmed. I started calling my parents telling them I couldn't handle it and that I can't do this. I was sitting on the floor of the bathroom so I wouldn't wake my roommate up. A brown haired girl came in and saw me crying. I told her what was wrong and she said that she felt that way when she first came to college. I remember her saying, "You will get through this, I promise." I felt a lot better after that. I remember seeing her a couple of times afterwards but I never got a chance to thank her for helping me.
 
There was a boy in junior high who helped me to stand back up after I slipped on some ice on the way to one of my classes. Admittedly I had been rude to this boy before, so he had every right to let me lie there on the ice. But he took time out of his day to help me even though I acted like a jerk towards him. It was a lesson in grace & humility that I will never forget as long as I live.
 
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