Today I am Rich!
If you haven’t read it yet from my Facebook profile or newsletter I send, here is another opportunity to read this inspiring story from Tim Sanders. sandersays.com
My grandmother, Billye Coffman, raised me on a farm in eastern New Mexico.
She took me in after my mother abandoned me in a motel room in Odessa TX. At the time, she and her husband were breaking up after twenty years of marriage. Tough stuff. He left us in less than a year. He cleaned out the accounts, ran up the bills and told everyone in town his wife was crazy. A few months after he left, two men came to our house and repossessed the stove and refrigerator. That was the first time I ever saw my grandmother cry.
A few years later, while eating breakfast, she and I saw a mountain of a man walking through our wheat field. He was heading straight for our house. She and I met him halfway in the orchard.
“Can I help you, sir?” she volleyed.
“I pray so, mam,” he confidently replied.
“I need a day’s work and a meal,” he continued. ”I’ve been walking for over a week, making my way from Oklahoma to my relatives in Winslow, Arizona. I lost everything to a swindler in Tulsa, and all I have is my winning smile.”
Billye agreed to give him a job for the day. She gave him a few tasks only he could perform, such as pruning branches on tall trees, painting the trim on the barn and chopping some kindling. He dove into the chores like a new-hire. I followed him around the entire time, peppering him with questions.
Around noon, Billye brought us two paper plates loaded with franks and ranch style beans, along with some fresh mustard potato salad. He dug into the plate with his plastic fork like it was a steak dinner. Between bites he waxed philosophical.
“Your grandmother is an angel, sent from heaven to have faith in a stranger,” he told me. ”I’m glad I walked this farm’s way”
At the end of the day, Billye thanked him and paid him in cash. She fished out a twenty dollar bill from her clutch purse, a small fortune to us at the time. She prayed with him, and asked God to find him more work on his way to Arizona. She noticed that his shoes were dogged out, with holes in both soles. She told him to wait as she went to the house and found her deceased father’s barely worn black wing tips.
“There, now you have new shoes for tomorrow,” she said, beaming.
He thanked her, with tears in his eyes. He put his new shoes on and strutted off to the west, carrying his possessions in a pillowcase. My grandmother put her arm around me, and pull me close to her side.
“Today we are rich,” she told me.
And since that day, I’ve never been poor.
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