It was June 4th 2015. Morgan Wheeler, a young woman in her 20s, was trying to drive out of the car park of a grocery store – when a man in a wheelchair suddenly blocked her way.
He was old, around 60-70 years old, and had stopped a few times alongside Morgan’s car in order to rest. It was obvious that he was fighting his way forward, and Morgan also noticed that he had lost one of his legs.
The man soon realised that Morgan was sat in her car waiting to drive out. He waved appologetically and tried to hurry by.
Morgan could have hit the gas, driven away and forgotten the situation there and then.
But she didn’t.
Instead she turned off the engine and opened the car door.
Morgan knew that she had all the time in the world to do the things she wanted to do that day. She also knew that the man in the wheelchair obviously needed help.
“I walked up to him and introduced myself. I asked him if I could assist him with his shopping today, and he, quite grumpily, said that he was doing just fine and was not getting much anyways,” Morgan writes on Facebook.
But Morgan was equally stubborn. She insisted on helping, told him a little bit about herself and eventually was allowed to accompany him.
When Morgan asked the man about himself, it became obvious that he hadn’t had it easy.
He was a war veteran who had just lost his wife – he explained this to Morgan with such pain on his face that she knew she shouldn’t question him further.
Instead she asked him if he had a shopping list. He had, with only four items written down: peanut butter, soup, bread and bananas.
“So I questioned how he got to the store,” Morgan continues on Facebook.
The man told her that he had pulled himself along in his wheelchair until he reached the highway and then hitchhiked to the parking lot.
Morgan promised to call a taxi for him as soon as they were done shopping.
Soon the man started to cry. Morgan knelt down next to him and asked what was wrong. In reply he asked her why anyone would do so much for a man they don’t know.
“I told him that where I am from, and from the family I was raised in, we help one another, no matter the task and that I had never met a stranger. I also told him that he deserved everything I was doing for him because he fought for my freedom and sacrificed so much,” Morgan writes on Facebook.
When the pair had finished shopping, Morgan paid for the groceries, despite the man insisting that he would pay for it himself.
They waited for the taxi together, she helped to load the grocery bags and wheelchair into the car and she gave the man all the money she had in her purse: USD $40.
Before he closed the door of the taxi,the man looked at her with tears in his eyes and thanked her once again.
On her way back to her car Morgan burst into tears.
“This is the world we live in today. How many people passed him and would have continued to pass him while he struggled?”, she writes in a Facebook post which has been shared thousands of times. She finishes with:
“Today was a truly humbling experience for me, and I consider myself extremely blessed to have the capability of understanding what is truly important in this world. THAT man was a HERO, and far too many will say otherwise.”