Remember this one?
Never did see that one, but it's quite clever. If this is real, may God bless the woman who did this.
Again, I can't help everybody. I can't
afford to help everyone. I just have to have some vague notion in my mind of whether
THIS particular person is the one I am called upon to help today.
Today, there was no doubt.
My dear father, though he would give the shirt off his back to anyone he was convinced needed it, was always skeptical of panhandlers ("winos" was his word for them). This said, he wrote off a $2000+ debt from a man who bought some furniture from him on time payments and couldn't pay for it, and for some reason seemed not to have the furniture anymore (maybe sold it because he needed the money and didn't have it to give back, that was the vibe we got, the man said "it would break my wife's heart to have to give that furniture back"). My father was not one to talk religion, but he said that he just didn't feel right about taking the guy to small claims court, and said he thought God would just want him to let it go. It wasn't good getting shafted like that, but he pretty well felt that the guy was in desperate financial straits --- he'd lost his job --- and, again, it just seemed like the right thing to do.
When I feel moved to do so, I just put the "wino" thing in the Hands of God, but I understand my father's skepticism. He wasn't a bad guy to owe money to. When he was about to be drafted (he went ahead and volunteered so that he could pick his specialty, Army medic), he had worked for an old-timey country doctor for many years. He didn't have a fixed salary, the doctor felt sorry for his having been left without a father at age 9 and with a widowed mother who cleaned house for people, and basically paid the family's bills in return for my father's work, to make sure those bills got paid. At the end, my father owed the doctor $900, but the doctor just forgave the debt. So maybe writing off the furniture guy's debt was my father's way of cutting someone else slack who needed it.