Depending on the kindness of strangers

No one ever knows when they will depend on the kindness of strangers, as Mary Dean Setliff, 89, discovered the afternoon she stepped outside to water her roses.
“My foot got tangled. I tripped over the water hose and fell in the front yard and hurt my hand,” she said.
Yes, she had on a medic-alert beeper, “but I did not want to call it. I did not want my children to find out. I thought if I can crawl from my driveway to my iron rail, I can get up.”
She could not get up, and no one in the passing cars noticed her.
“I prayed. Lord, send an angel. I need some help,” she said. “All the sudden this black lady riding a bicycle saw me down on the ground. She turned loose her bicycle and came over to me saying, ‘I believe you need some help.’ She was a small lady like I am,” Setliff recalled.
“Honey, all you have to do is put your arms around my neck,” her angel said.
That was not quite enough. Another woman saw their struggle and came over to help.
Back on her feet, Setliff said, “you are truly an angel sent by God.”
“I did not plan to come this way, but I did,” the cyclist said. “I am a child of God and I know He sent me this way.” She said her name was Hazel.
“Well, Hazel, sweetheart, I can only give you the gift of prayer,” Setliff replied.
The three made a little huddle on the sidewalk and prayed. “I was praying a blessing on them,” Setliff said when a relative passed by in his car and noted the sidewalk prayer meeting. He did not know about the fall and assistance, but the sidewalk prayer meeting impressed him so much that he commented on Facebook about the sidewalk prayer of the three.
He received calls from around the world saying, “We need more of that.”
“They left as quickly as they came. I did not know them but, we need more people like her who stop,” Setliff concluded. We do need more folks, strangers to those in need, who will stop and be Good Samaritans.
Having been stranded beside the road a time or two, my husband and I stop as often as we can to help – as we did the day we left the Interstate for gas and plunged into the afternoon traffic crossing the bridge to the shopping center. Weaving our way through the rush of cars, we spotted a man walking on the edge of the road ahead of us.
Except, he did not stay on the edge of the road. He slowly staggered back and forth across the white line, tipping first one direction and then the other.
“We have to stop and get that man off the road!”
Pulling off the road just ahead of the wanderer, we jumped out. But not before he fell into the line of traffic. Cars slowed and drove around him as we rushed back to him. We had barely reached him when a huge, black, pick-up truck, with its lights flashing, stopped so that it blocked traffic. The driver quickly exited and joined us.
“I’m a paramedic,” the man explained as he knelt down with us, “Hey, buddy. Can you hear me?” He reached to feel for the guy’s pulse.
A police car stopped. One officer hopped out and directed traffic around the area while the other officer came to see what was happening.
“He was kind of staggering along in and out of the road,” we explained.
“Sometimes they are diabetic with a low blood sugar,” the officer said. The man opened his eyes, looked around and mumbled something.
“Can you get up, sir? We need to get you over on the side of the road,” the officer said.
The man protested he did not need any help, but he obviously did. Even though he brushed them off angrily, the paramedic and the officer helped him move to the grass where he again slumped down, grumbling that he was all right before he fell back on the grass.
“An ambulance is on its way” the officer said.
We left to find gas and puzzle over the stranger who literally fell down in the path of many strangers.
It reminds me of the time 20 years ago when my dad was driving by himself a couple of hundred miles away from any familiar face. He stopped to eat in a town where no one knew him and had a stroke.
Some stranger called for an ambulance. Strangers sorted out his papers, his contacts, his medical history and tracked down family members. Strangers became his neighbors, Good Samaritans, guardian angels. Call them what you may, they helped get him back on his feet and on the road to health.
“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” Vivien Leigh says in her closing line in the classic movie “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
As have we all.