A woman has shared an incredibly touching scene she recently observed in which a fellow passenger on a Chicago train kindly gave a homeless man the boots off of his own feet.
Jessica Bell said that she was on the CTA Redline in Chicago when she noticed an “older, weathered” homeless man who was “minding his own business.”
“His feet are so swollen he’s wearing the tattered gym shoes he has with the back folded down; like slip-ons,” she wrote in a post shared by Love What Matters. “I don’t know how many pairs of socks he’s wearing in an attempt to keep his feet warm but there is blood seeping through.”
Then, on the other side of the train, was a young man with a suitcase and nice clothes. This younger man was wearing snow boots that Bell said looked both new and expensive — boots that were “built for a Chicago winter.”
"So, I'm headed home on the CTA Redline and there's a homeless man sitting across from me. He's older, weathered,…
Posted by Love What Matters on Sunday, January 14, 2018
That man could have ignored the homeless man’s plight; he could have simply gotten off the train and not given the man a second thought. But he instead took a starkly different course.
“Quietly, in a blink and you’ll miss it fashion, the younger man takes off the boots he’s wearing and passes them to the old man. He opens his suitcase and gives him a pair of socks as well,” Bell said. “The young man puts on a spare pair of shoes from the suitcase.”
The shoes the man put on were nice, but they weren’t as good as the boots — and they weren’t what the homeless man really needed, she explained.
The young man then told the recipient of his kind act to clean his feet and to change the socks as soon as he could. The scene left both Bell and others “floored,” as the man had given the shoes right off of his feet.
“I love that in a time and place where hate and apathy are rampant, quiet compassion appears without warning,” she wrote. “I pray that we all are compelled to do similar. I pray that we all allow empathy to invoke action.”
(H/T: Love What Matters)