This is a 100% true account, as unbelievable as it is, of a girl that I know.

This girl works at a gas station. One day, around lunch, she was having lunch behind the counter, delivered chinese food to be exact.

A man came in to pay for his gas. When he saw her eating the chinese, he said, ‘What’s your fortune?”

Caught off guard, she said, “What?”

“Your fortune from the cookie” the man replied, “What’s your fortune?”

This girl opened it up and amused by the irony said, “It says ‘Smile!’.”

The man enthusiastically said, “Well then smile!”

She hastily replied, “I would be smiling if I was still in bed.” She had been short on sleep that day.

So the man asked her, “So were you smiling when you woke up in bed this morning?”

My friend frowned and said, ‘Well not this morning. I’ve had a rough couple of days.”

The man curiously followed up by saying, ‘What’s wrong?”

She told him that she had been in two separate car accidents in the past two weeks. That her back still wasn’t feeling right and that she needed to come up with $1,000 to get her car fixed so she could freely commute to school and work.

The man looked at her and said, “I’m awfully sorry about that. Things will turn around soon. Good luck to you.”

With that he left to return to his car and my friend went on to help another customer with a lottery ticket.

The man returned into the store and tossed something across the counter toward the girl. She looked up at him quickly with a smile and he left again. She went on helping the lottery customer assuming, as many do, he was just passing along some piece of garbage he wanted her to throw away.

When her view of the paper was no longer obstructed, she noticed it was a white envelope.

She turned it over and in big black letters wrote the word, “Smile!”

She opened the unsealed envelope to find 10 $100 dollar bills.

Quickly she went outside, only to find that the man had gone.

I am amazed at the selflessness of this mystery man’s gesture of goodwill and wanted to share the story with you readers. If you are that man who helped this young woman in need, rest assured that every cent of the money went to fixing her car, and that she is forever grateful.

In such unknown economic turbulence, it is really easy to start clinging to every penny on the fear that one day you won’t have any left. But what we must realize is money isn’t real. It doesn’t have any existential substance. No one ever left this life with their checkbook.

But this story is worth more than the $1,000 this man so graciously (and anonymously) passed along. Pay it forward. Share this story. And remember that we’re all in this together. Empathy for our common man must be not only preached, but practiced.