Christmas is the time when you wish to spend time with family and all your loved ones. Being courteous to others, displaying empathy, being modest, and assisting people in need are all characteristics of a selfless person. Read this beautiful story of how this woman’s selfless gift made this couple’s Christmas special.
My husband, Chris, joined the Marine Corps in April of 2007. Shortly after, we were stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina—seven hours from our home in Virginia. Our first Christmas in the United States Marine Corps was bittersweet, knowing that Chris would be deploying less than a year later and we’d be separated during the holidays. So we stretched our last few dollars to the limit to make the trip home.
Unfortunately, we realized once we were there we would be about a tank of gas short of making it home and he would have to either suck up his pride and ask someone in his family for money, which he refused to do, or try to make it home with what we had.
On Christmas night, after spending the day with his family, we stopped at a gas station to top off the tank and began to pray this would carry us home. My husband was in uniform and he began to fill the tank. My car, as is the case with many Marine wives’ cars, is decorated heavily with United States Marine stickers and quotes.
To our surprise, a middle-aged lady at the next pump over came up to Chris. “Are you a Marine?” the lady asked him. With his head held high and his shoulders back, “Yes Ma’am,” was his reply. She proceeded to thank him for his service to his country and to ask him questions about where he was stationed and if he was from around this area originally.
At the conclusion of their conversation, she thanked him again and insisted on paying for his gas. She handed my husband forty dollars. Although he asked, the kind woman would not give her name or any information to contact her.
She walked away toward the front of the store where my mother-in-law was coming out from paying for her gas. “Is that your boy?” was her question to Chris’s mom.
Smiling, she answered, “Yes, that’s my son.”
“I want to thank you also for allowing and supporting your son to serve in the military,” she said.
God smiled on us for our first Christmas in the Marine Corps and sent an angel to answer our prayers. I only wish that woman knew how much she affected my husband and me with her selfless gift.
