It was late in the afternoon after a busy morning of drive-through food bank when I heard the knock on our front door. I put on my mask and unlocked the door for a woman and her teenage daughter. “I wonder if we can come in. I’d like to make a donation,” the woman said. We ‘eye-smiled’ at each other through our masks and I welcomed them inside to escape the cold wind.
“My name is Wendy and this is my daughter Megan,” she said. (Not their real names). “The last time we were here was 10 years ago when she was just a little girl,” she said, pointing to her daughter. “I needed help and POM was a God-send.” Wendy went on to explain that she and her husband had lost everything during the economic recession twelve years ago. “We both had good jobs. We had a large savings and lived on a small farm with the perfect little farm house on it.” Wendy and her family had lost it all. She didn’t really explain the circumstances, just that they had suddenly found themselves struggling and didn’t know where to turn.
She then handed me three crisp one hundred-dollar bills. I sort of stared at her, eyes filling with tears. “I’ve wanted to do this for a long time,” Wendy said. She told me how much POM had helped her family back then and she simply wanted to pay it forward. “It’s taken us awhile, but we made it. You all were so incredibly kind to us. I just want others to experience that same sense of ‘it-will-all-be-okay’ that I did when I finally worked up the courage to come here.”
Wendy shared how hard it was to walk through that door a decade earlier. She told me that she was terrified. She was afraid of being judged, of being labeled. “I burst into tears the moment I started telling my story,” she said, “and the lady here just gave me a huge hug and told me it was going to be okay. I didn’t really know what to think but I was no longer afraid. I knew I’d made the right decision.”
Wendy, Megan and I chatted for a little while longer. I was completely in awe of her strength and tenacity in overcoming the odds stacked against her. It doesn’t happen every day, but when clients come back and share their success and happiness with us, we are always overwhelmed with joy. It’s why we do what we do, helping people find solutions to some of life’s biggest challenges. And, we are grateful to you, our incredible community that never tires of supporting our neighbors in need, so people like Wendy can find hope and joy in their lives once again.