If you’ve ever been helped by a stranger, you know it’s an wonderful feeling. You’re lost or you forget to bring enough change for the bus, and out of the blue someone offers to help. Amazing! The few times that this has happened to me, I’ve had to wonder Why me? and Why did this person go out of their way to help me? But each time, before I could ask, my guardian angel disappeared. In the story below, on the other hand, a woman gets the chance to ask one special hero why he helped her daughter. And his answer, as you’ll see, is breathtaking. Read it below!
“Bob Butler lost his legs in a 1965 land mine explosion in Vietnam. He returned home a war hero. Twenty years later, he proved once again that heroism comes from the heart.
Butler was working in his garage in a small town in Arizona, on a hot summer day when he heard a woman’s screams coming from a nearby house. He rolled his wheelchair toward the house, but the dense shrubbery wouldn’t allow him access to the back door. So the veteran got out of his chair and crawled through the dirt and bushes.
‘I had to get there,’ he says. ‘It didn’t matter how much it hurt.’
When Butler arrived at the house, he traced the screams to the pool, where a 3-year-old girl named Stephanie was lying at the bottom. She had been born without arms and had fallen in the water and couldn’t swim. Her mother stood over her baby screaming frantically. Butler dove to the bottom of the pool and brought little Stephanie up to the deck. Her face was blue, she had no pulse and she was not breathing.
Butler immediately went to work performing CPR to revive her while Stephanie’s mother telephoned the fire department.
She was told the paramedics were already out on a call.
Helplessly, she sobbed and hugged Butler’s shoulder.
As Butler continued with his CPR, he calmly reassured Stephanie’s mother. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I was her arms to get out of the pool. It’ll be okay. I am now her lungs. Together we can make it.’
Seconds later, the little girl coughed, regained consciousness and began to cry. As they hugged and rejoiced together, the mother asked Butler how he knew it would be okay.
‘When my legs were blown off in the war, I was all alone in a field. No one was there to help except a little Vietnamese girl. As she struggled to drag me into her village, she whispered in broken English, ‘It okay. You can live. I be your legs. Together we make it.’
‘This was my chance,’ he told Stephanie’s mom, ‘to return the favor.’”
If you were moved by this story, please share. You never know how many acts of kindness it will inspire!
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