Pay it Forward

It was over a year ago that my son and I were geocaching in the Ocala National Forest. The road was good and my car was moving.

Then the road got bad and a corner… and sand…and… STUCK!

For an hour we shoveled and pushed but that little car just wasn’t moving.

Then a couple of hunters came along in a four wheel drive pick-up truck. “Can you pull us out?”

It didn’t take long for them to hook up my little Saturn and pull our stuck behinds to the safety of the main road. I was very grateful that they came by when they did. I don’t know what we would have done had they not happened by when they did.

Fast forward to just this weekend.

I was again geocaching in the forest. This time I grew some common sense and I went with a friend that had a 4X4 SUV. Driving down and narrow sandy trail deep in the forest we came upon a small group of guys on ATV’s. With them was a dune buggy with a driver and a passenger. We said hello and drove on to a geocache a couple hundred yards down the trail.

As I’m looking for the cache I heard voices. The voices were getting closer and seemed pretty frantic. I came out of the woods to find the two guys from the dune buggy running down the trail.

“Our dune buggy…broke…an axle…our friends gone…no cell phone…no GPS…lost…”

After a few minutes he calmed down and we assessed their situation.

They didn’t know where they were or where their friends were. They couldn’t fix their buggy.

Of course it my turn to payback the guys that helped me last year.

“Hop in”.

We drove them about 10 miles through the forest to their campsite and their family. I’ve never seen a more thankful couple of guys.

It was no skin off my back. After all, some did it for me about a year ago….

The message for today is twofold: First, don’t feel bad when people help you. That is what they are there for. 

Second, be ready and willing to help someone else. After all, you never know when it will be your turn to need to help.