April 1, 2025 • 20 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Our American Stories listener Tim Hennessey talks about his viral Facebook post that exemplifies the everyday goodness in this country.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American Stories and up next
a story from one of our listeners. And by the way,
we love our listener's story, send him to our American
Stories dot com. They are truly some of our favorites.
When there was a break in the deep freeze that
swept across Texas in February of twenty twenty one, Tim
Hennessy and his wife deb piled into his jeep and
(00:32):
headed for h Eb, a beloved grocery store chain for
many Texans. It has almost a cult like following. Tim
shared his story on his Facebook page and it immediately
went viral. Tim, who's a big fan of our show,
contacted us to see if we'd think our listeners would
want to hear it, and we of course said yes.
(00:54):
Here's Tim with the story he and his wife entitled
the Heart of America.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Very quick background. Originally from Chicago and we lived there
many years and then we moved to My wife and
I dad moved to California in nineteen ninety three for
an opportunity and it seemed like California. It was kind
of like the heyday for California. Things are moving, Things
were pretty good for us there. We lived there twenty
three years and then three or four years ago, my
(01:23):
kids decided to move to Houston and they basically said,
you know, we just can't afford to live in California.
The best we could do is get an apartment for
twenty five hundred dollars a month, and it was just
too expensive and they didn't want to be house poor.
So they moved to Texas and tore our heart out,
really honestly, and we caught our We found ourselves sitting
(01:45):
in California at home. We still have a son who
was in California. We found one day we found ourselves
sitting there, going, what are we doing here? We have
a grandson in Houston, and we kind of you know,
we love California. The beauty, the weather. It's kind of hard.
There's very few places in the entire world you're going
to get that kind of beauty and weather and stuff.
And we thought it's the best at both worlds. We
(02:08):
moved to Texas. We have a lot more freedom than
we have in California. We could save a lot more
money before we retire, and we get to see our
grandkids every single day. So a few years ago we
decided to move and you know, I find people are
nice everywhere you live. You could, you know, I think
(02:28):
it's what you focus on. There's good people everywhere, but
there's a it's a level of niceness in Texas. The
people that kind of struck us as soon as we
moved here. It's almost like, why are you so nice
to us? What's your agenda? And it's it's a different
kind of nice. And so that kind of niceness we
(02:49):
recognized everywhere. Yes they're no here, yes ma'am, No, ma'am.
And there's and the people at wherever where you go
are just a different level of nice. So right around
February twenty twenty one, somewhere in there, twenty twenty one,
it was a historic storm here in Texas. Fifteen degrees
are below closer to zero a couple of days for
(03:11):
a whole week, and Texas is just not built for that.
When I live in Chicago, they had snowplows, they had
salt for the roads. Here they're not built for They
don't have that kind of stuff because it's rarely that cold.
Usually maybe gets down to thirty degrees. Power was going
out for four days off and on every couple hours
it was out hardest powers when the water went out,
(03:33):
because you're you start thinking to yourself, Okay, this is
getting real. Now, how long is this water going to
be out? Is this a day, two days, three days
a week? You know? Could you start thinking these stories
of people don't have water for a month. So in
between that, we had snow on one of the days.
And when you get some snow that goes over the ice,
it makes it a little bit more easy traction wise,
(03:55):
because we didn't want to drive anywhere. The roads were
literally impassable. You couldn't go anywhere. You could even walk
on the roads, you'd fall down. So we got some snow.
So my wifie said, well we got a little bit
of a break. Let's go to the store. Let's get
a few things for some friends. We decided to drive
to a local store here called AGB. HB is like
the dominating grocery chain in Texas, and so we pulled in.
(04:20):
People were lining up. We got on the line, about
fifty people. We made the best were probably outside for
about twenty minutes. Finally the line started moving. We got
in the store and about ten fifteen minutes into shopping,
the lights went out and you literally could hear it
go oh, here we go again, and so we looked
(04:41):
around at each other. It's like, well, let's just keep
shopping until we're told not to shop. In the back
of my mind, I kept thinking they're going to come
along pretty soon and make us leave. I was hoping
they weren't just going to kick us out and we
have to leave our stuff there, but I kind of
half expected that. So we shopped for about ten to
fifteen minutes. My wife was going to oh, she said, oh,
(05:01):
I forgot the bananas, So we started going that way.
That's when one of the employees came along and said, hey, folks,
would you mind going to the front and we'll get
you checked out as quickly as we can. We have
a process for this, so don't worry. We'll get you
out here as quickly as we can. So of course,
we go up and we get in line. There's probably ten,
I would say ten to twelve people in front of us.
(05:24):
Most of people had full baskets. Bunch of people behind us.
I don't know, maybe ten twelve. I didn't really look,
but there's a ton. So I thought this is going
to take a long time. Because there was about fifteen
other lines, people going from the front to the back
of the store, because everybody's checking out at the same time.
So I'm in my mind. I even said to deb
my wife, I said, well, this is going to take
a long time. Are they going to get calculators out?
(05:45):
What are they going to do? We weren't sure, so
I thought, well, maybe we're just waiting for the power
to kick back in and maybe they have a generator.
So maybe ten twenty minutes somewhere in there went by.
We didn't. We barely moved. I don't even know if
we moved up one cart, and then all of a sudden,
within a few minutes we started moving. And as we
moved up, a woman's employee says, do you guys have
(06:05):
any alcohol? Like look at our carts, And I said no,
but if you're giving out drinks, I could use one
right now, you know, just kind of make it fun.
I like to have fun with people. And so within
a few minutes, I mean literally just a couple of minutes,
we were ushered to an open aisle and they waved
us over. We go over there. My wife starts putting
stuff on the canar belt and the woman said, oh,
(06:27):
don't put anything up there, we won't be able to
bag anything today. So I thought it was kind of weird, Okay,
So we pushed our car to the end, and she
looked at us, looked at our groceries and kind of
motioned with her arm like go home and be safe,
you know, drive home safe. And we looked at her
like I even said, who, how do we pay? And
(06:50):
as I'm saying this, I'm watching all these carts go
out the door, and it kind of hit us like, wow,
they're literally sending us home without asking us who we are,
looking at what we had, counting anything, expecting anything from us,
And I turned to my wife. She's tearing up. It
(07:11):
was just this wonderful gesture of this company. Because we
always want to bash companies that they're all for profit.
This company is literally letting two hundred people walk out
of this store without paying a single dime, without asking
who you voted for, what's your social status, who you are, nothing, because,
(07:32):
quite frankly, because you're a customer. It's just an amazing thing.
So we started leaving and we're like, this is unbelievable.
And we get to the door and there's about eight
to ten of their employees standing there and kind of
greeting us. So it felt like a wedding, like okay
for everybody, go home, be safe. They're waving at us,
(07:53):
and it became like a festive mood. And I turned
at the edge of the door and I said, oh,
wait a minute, I forgot the file at Mignon, you know,
And they all busted out laugh and they knew what
it was what I was saying. I'm just kidding. Of course,
you know, part of you thinks, man, I should have
got the flat Mignon, you know, but of course we're
all laughing about it. And we started getting the parking lot,
(08:15):
and it was very hard to maneuver the carts because
of bumps of ice and snow, and without bags in
the carts, stuff started falling out of people's carts and
you could see everybody helping each other, holding on to
other people's carts in front of behind them, helping them.
And we all do this every day, but in that moment,
it felt like I want to do even more. It's just,
(08:36):
you know, giving that that act when someone gives you
an act of kindness and generosity for no reason. First
you feel, I don't know a little guilty because I
never felt entitled, but I felt a little not guilty.
I don't know what the right word is, but he
felt like, Wow, we didn't deserve that. Can I give
to somebody else who made who they need help? You know?
(08:57):
So with that in mind, I got back to my car.
We started driving home. We were talking about, Wow, you
don't see that every day, you know, a store like
HGB just did that for its customers. So I told
my wife, I said, I'm going to write about this
story and I'm going to post it on Facebook and
just share with a few of my friends.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And you've been listening to Tim Hennessy tell the story
of an experience in a grocery store when we come
back to Texans here on our American Stories and we
(09:39):
continue with our American stories. And when we last left off,
Tim Hennessy was about to post his experience in that
grocery chain on Facebook, and let's pick up what's him.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This last year, we've gotten bombarded with nothing but bad news,
and maybe even the last decade or two, it just
seemed like we get more and more bad news because
I just saw that as this is the America that
I know and love and that's what I was going
to tell the story. This is the America I know
and love, not the stuff you see in the newspaper,
(10:11):
on the news all day, you know, all the time.
So and my wife was thinking about it for a second.
She said, why don't you just call it the heart
of America? And I just liked what she said. It
just hit me at them. I said, you know what,
that's what I'm going to call it because it kind
of is more succinct. This is the heart of America.
It truly is. So then she said, you know, I
took tim I took a picture and I said you did.
(10:34):
She goes, yeah, I didn't really want people to know
who's taking it, and she said, I just want. Through
her tears, she said, I'm I just captured that moment
for us. It was just a unique thing to see.
I said, well, send me that picture. I'll include that
with the post. And I literally just wrote it. I
actually gave it to my wife in a word document.
She's my editor because I'm not the best speller. I
(10:56):
hate to admit that I read voraciously, but I can
not spell. For nothing. Thank you God for a spell check,
Like the word separate, forget it. I put an EAI,
I don't know if it's e in the middle A. Anyway,
I'm getting off topic here, so she's edited for me,
and I just posted it and then I think our
(11:17):
power went out again a little while later, and then
we woke up on that Wednesday after I posted it,
and then sometime in the middle of the day, I thought, well,
we checked my Facebook post just to see, if you know,
a couple of hundred my friends what they thought of
that story. And I thought, oh my, how does this happen?
(11:38):
At that time, it was like twelve or thirteen thousand shares,
a couple thousand comments, and probably ten thousand likes. And
I'm like, oh, I don't have that many friends. How
does this happen? How does this happen? And I actually
called a friend of my daughters who works for Facebook,
and I said, Jesse, what the heck? And she says,
(12:00):
what the heck? I said, well, you're supposed to, you're
the expert. Don't tell me what the heck? How does
this happen? And she said, I don't know. Tim. I
think the story hit a nerve at the right time.
I think people needed to hear good news through all this.
So then then I got worried. Okay, I did not
expect this to go like this. I was literally sharing
(12:22):
with a few friends. So I got worried. So I
called the store said have you heard about a Facebook
post about your store going viral? He goes, yes, we did.
I said, is it okay? And it was a manager.
I asked for it, and I said is it okay?
Because I didn't really I didn't know this was going
to happen. I didn't want to get anybody in trouble.
He said, no, it's all good, sir. I got the
(12:44):
impression without him saying that that is a very positive
thing for that store. Right. So, but I wanted to
call their corporate office too, for a couple of reasons.
One I wanted to double check that it was okay,
and two I wanted to find out what their chair
these were. And so I got ahold of somebody there
and they said the local food Bank is one of
(13:06):
their charities. And also they directed me to their website,
and she also mentioned this place called Lady Lodge. It's
a family Christian based camp where people go and the
donations help pay for families who can't afford it, and
there's no cell service or internet. It's literally you're going camping,
and it's a few hours away from us here in Texas.
(13:26):
And so my wife and I wrote checks to both
of them for more than what we would have paid
in groceries, because we felt like this was such a
great gesture. It was our way of giving back somehow, right.
But the next day that story just kept getting bigger
and bigger, and it was over thirty thousand shares, thirty
two hundred comments, more likes than I could ever count.
(13:48):
And then the phone started ringing. I got text messages,
email messages, direct messages from various news organizations, CNN, Watching Post,
Fox News, NBC, People Magazine, basically the who of media.
And then I still got a little bit nervous about
it because I thought, well, I don't want this company.
(14:09):
This is a very private company, very humble company. They
do a lot for the community, HIV does a lot.
They're almost always whenever there's a disaster, they're almost always
the first there for water or food supplies. They very
generous company in Texas, family oriented, And so I called
them one more time. I said, you know, i've been
(14:31):
doing these interviews. I don't know if anybody saw it,
But have somebody call me back and let me know
if you want me to continue or stop, because I'll
stop today because it's not about me. I just wanted
to not necessarily promote the store, but just to show
the goodness that there is in this country, because there's
a lot of good things in this country. We see
it every single day. We see it all across this country.
(14:55):
We see it in our neighborhoods. How many of us
go out every day we help somebody, But it doesn't
make the news because that's what that's what we're supposed
to do. That's what God wants us to do. That's
why we're here. We're here to be good to each other. Right.
And so they called me back, one of their corporate
spokespeople call me back. I don't know if it's the
next day or that same day, I can't remember. And
(15:16):
we talked about a half hour on the phone, and
he said, Tim, he goes, let me just tell you something,
he goes, We're not going to stop what you're doing.
We love what you're doing. When we're getting a lot
of phone calls right now about if that story is
true or not, and all we do is tell them, yes,
it happened, but that's as far as they go. And basically,
(15:39):
because they don't want to toot their own horn. They
could easily they could easily point to their back and go,
look at the name of the my back of my jersey.
This is a g B. Aren't we great? But that's
not what they want to do. That's how great of
a company they are. Oh, I wanted to add one
more thing. So and this is for my wife. Just
(16:00):
give her credit. This is my wife, Debbie. I have
to give her a credit for this because this is her.
She says this all the time, and that's why she
took that picture too. She says this following phrase. God
only needs a moment, right, God only needs a moment?
(16:23):
And and and in the phrase that I One of
my favorite quotes that I kind of lived my life
by is from Albert Einstein, and it goes like this,
live your life is if there are no miracles, or
everything is a miracle. I probably boss that quote little
nervous right now, but so I live it as if
(16:44):
everything's a miracle. And when you look for good things,
you look for the miracles in life. It may seem
silly to go, Wow, you think it's a miracle. This
guy let everything, these people walk out the store. I
think it is. That's what we look or the moments.
And again I got to give my wife credit for
a God only needs a moment. You look for these things,
(17:05):
you see them everywhere. They don't get reported all the time,
but we see him. And I'll give you an example
of another moment or a miracle happened during the same
week I saw the story. It was in San Antonio, Texas.
I believe it was a seven eleven and there's either
the owner or the manager who wrote this on Twitter.
(17:28):
And she went to her store one morning and all
the water that's left out outside on palettes was missing.
She said, over one hundred cases of water we're missing.
And she thought, well, I guess people needed water because
we're having issues. So she understood it. And she goes
(17:50):
to open the door of the seven eleven and there
on the floor was six hundred and twenty dollars in
all kind of different denominational bills. So in other words,
it wasn't just one person who just put in six
hundred twenty dollars. They put they slid through the slit
of the door, not like a mail slot, you know,
like some doors a mail the slit of the door.
They slid in six hundred and twenty dollars in ones, twos, tens, twenties,
(18:14):
and there's a picture of it. That is a miracle. Right,
So we see these all over the place. And I'll
give a couple other example. I don't know if it's
a great example, but in my neighborhood and probably all
across Texas, people were out walking u driving when we
could going house to house checking out people. How are
(18:37):
you doing? Did you know you can melt snow and
ice to flush to put in the back of your
toildt to flush you I didn't know that. Okay, great,
And we see this everywhere all over this country. Like
I said, thousand times a day. How many times have
you heard of a police officer And this happens all
the time. Maybe somebody stand in front of them doesn't
have enough money to pay for their food or whatever,
(18:57):
and that officer, they're not gonna make it the most
money in the world, will take out their own money
and pay for that. Right. Every once in a while
we hear that story, But that happens all the time.
Those kind of things. So miracles do happen every single day.
This world is a miracle, and we're all here, and
the sun rise every day and sets every day. We
(19:18):
take it for granted, but it's still a miracle. You know.
When I go turn the lights on now, I think
twice about it, because we didn't have it for a
few days. When I turned a faucet on, I think
twice about it now. A week ago it was like
not even in your mind. Those are miracles if you
(19:39):
think about it that way that some waters come from
some planet, it's treated the electricity is coming from someplace.
It comes into my place and it gives me light,
gives me the power of my refrigerator, my TV, my stove,
all these things. We take it for granted. We have
delegated so many things in our lives. Is just mundane.
But they're miracles.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
And you've been listening to Tim Hennessy The Heart of America,
a story of the Hennessy family and H. E. B.
A grocery chain that wanted nothing, no credit, no adulation.
They just did the right thing. This great story here
on our American stories
And we continue with our American Stories and up next
a story from one of our listeners. And by the way,
we love our listener's story, send him to our American
Stories dot com. They are truly some of our favorites.
When there was a break in the deep freeze that
swept across Texas in February of twenty twenty one, Tim
Hennessy and his wife deb piled into his jeep and
(00:32):
headed for h Eb, a beloved grocery store chain for
many Texans. It has almost a cult like following. Tim
shared his story on his Facebook page and it immediately
went viral. Tim, who's a big fan of our show,
contacted us to see if we'd think our listeners would
want to hear it, and we of course said yes.
(00:54):
Here's Tim with the story he and his wife entitled
the Heart of America.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Very quick background. Originally from Chicago and we lived there
many years and then we moved to My wife and
I dad moved to California in nineteen ninety three for
an opportunity and it seemed like California. It was kind
of like the heyday for California. Things are moving, Things
were pretty good for us there. We lived there twenty
three years and then three or four years ago, my
(01:23):
kids decided to move to Houston and they basically said,
you know, we just can't afford to live in California.
The best we could do is get an apartment for
twenty five hundred dollars a month, and it was just
too expensive and they didn't want to be house poor.
So they moved to Texas and tore our heart out,
really honestly, and we caught our We found ourselves sitting
(01:45):
in California at home. We still have a son who
was in California. We found one day we found ourselves
sitting there, going, what are we doing here? We have
a grandson in Houston, and we kind of you know,
we love California. The beauty, the weather. It's kind of hard.
There's very few places in the entire world you're going
to get that kind of beauty and weather and stuff.
And we thought it's the best at both worlds. We
(02:08):
moved to Texas. We have a lot more freedom than
we have in California. We could save a lot more
money before we retire, and we get to see our
grandkids every single day. So a few years ago we
decided to move and you know, I find people are
nice everywhere you live. You could, you know, I think
(02:28):
it's what you focus on. There's good people everywhere, but
there's a it's a level of niceness in Texas. The
people that kind of struck us as soon as we
moved here. It's almost like, why are you so nice
to us? What's your agenda? And it's it's a different
kind of nice. And so that kind of niceness we
(02:49):
recognized everywhere. Yes they're no here, yes ma'am, No, ma'am.
And there's and the people at wherever where you go
are just a different level of nice. So right around
February twenty twenty one, somewhere in there, twenty twenty one,
it was a historic storm here in Texas. Fifteen degrees
are below closer to zero a couple of days for
(03:11):
a whole week, and Texas is just not built for that.
When I live in Chicago, they had snowplows, they had
salt for the roads. Here they're not built for They
don't have that kind of stuff because it's rarely that cold.
Usually maybe gets down to thirty degrees. Power was going
out for four days off and on every couple hours
it was out hardest powers when the water went out,
(03:33):
because you're you start thinking to yourself, Okay, this is
getting real. Now, how long is this water going to
be out? Is this a day, two days, three days
a week? You know? Could you start thinking these stories
of people don't have water for a month. So in
between that, we had snow on one of the days.
And when you get some snow that goes over the ice,
it makes it a little bit more easy traction wise,
(03:55):
because we didn't want to drive anywhere. The roads were
literally impassable. You couldn't go anywhere. You could even walk
on the roads, you'd fall down. So we got some snow.
So my wifie said, well we got a little bit
of a break. Let's go to the store. Let's get
a few things for some friends. We decided to drive
to a local store here called AGB. HB is like
the dominating grocery chain in Texas, and so we pulled in.
(04:20):
People were lining up. We got on the line, about
fifty people. We made the best were probably outside for
about twenty minutes. Finally the line started moving. We got
in the store and about ten fifteen minutes into shopping,
the lights went out and you literally could hear it
go oh, here we go again, and so we looked
(04:41):
around at each other. It's like, well, let's just keep
shopping until we're told not to shop. In the back
of my mind, I kept thinking they're going to come
along pretty soon and make us leave. I was hoping
they weren't just going to kick us out and we
have to leave our stuff there, but I kind of
half expected that. So we shopped for about ten to
fifteen minutes. My wife was going to oh, she said, oh,
(05:01):
I forgot the bananas, So we started going that way.
That's when one of the employees came along and said, hey, folks,
would you mind going to the front and we'll get
you checked out as quickly as we can. We have
a process for this, so don't worry. We'll get you
out here as quickly as we can. So of course,
we go up and we get in line. There's probably ten,
I would say ten to twelve people in front of us.
(05:24):
Most of people had full baskets. Bunch of people behind us.
I don't know, maybe ten twelve. I didn't really look,
but there's a ton. So I thought this is going
to take a long time. Because there was about fifteen
other lines, people going from the front to the back
of the store, because everybody's checking out at the same time.
So I'm in my mind. I even said to deb
my wife, I said, well, this is going to take
a long time. Are they going to get calculators out?
(05:45):
What are they going to do? We weren't sure, so
I thought, well, maybe we're just waiting for the power
to kick back in and maybe they have a generator.
So maybe ten twenty minutes somewhere in there went by.
We didn't. We barely moved. I don't even know if
we moved up one cart, and then all of a sudden,
within a few minutes we started moving. And as we
moved up, a woman's employee says, do you guys have
(06:05):
any alcohol? Like look at our carts, And I said no,
but if you're giving out drinks, I could use one
right now, you know, just kind of make it fun.
I like to have fun with people. And so within
a few minutes, I mean literally just a couple of minutes,
we were ushered to an open aisle and they waved
us over. We go over there. My wife starts putting
stuff on the canar belt and the woman said, oh,
(06:27):
don't put anything up there, we won't be able to
bag anything today. So I thought it was kind of weird, Okay,
So we pushed our car to the end, and she
looked at us, looked at our groceries and kind of
motioned with her arm like go home and be safe,
you know, drive home safe. And we looked at her
like I even said, who, how do we pay? And
(06:50):
as I'm saying this, I'm watching all these carts go
out the door, and it kind of hit us like, wow,
they're literally sending us home without asking us who we are,
looking at what we had, counting anything, expecting anything from us,
And I turned to my wife. She's tearing up. It
(07:11):
was just this wonderful gesture of this company. Because we
always want to bash companies that they're all for profit.
This company is literally letting two hundred people walk out
of this store without paying a single dime, without asking
who you voted for, what's your social status, who you are, nothing, because,
(07:32):
quite frankly, because you're a customer. It's just an amazing thing.
So we started leaving and we're like, this is unbelievable.
And we get to the door and there's about eight
to ten of their employees standing there and kind of
greeting us. So it felt like a wedding, like okay
for everybody, go home, be safe. They're waving at us,
(07:53):
and it became like a festive mood. And I turned
at the edge of the door and I said, oh,
wait a minute, I forgot the file at Mignon, you know,
And they all busted out laugh and they knew what
it was what I was saying. I'm just kidding. Of course,
you know, part of you thinks, man, I should have
got the flat Mignon, you know, but of course we're
all laughing about it. And we started getting the parking lot,
(08:15):
and it was very hard to maneuver the carts because
of bumps of ice and snow, and without bags in
the carts, stuff started falling out of people's carts and
you could see everybody helping each other, holding on to
other people's carts in front of behind them, helping them.
And we all do this every day, but in that moment,
it felt like I want to do even more. It's just,
(08:36):
you know, giving that that act when someone gives you
an act of kindness and generosity for no reason. First
you feel, I don't know a little guilty because I
never felt entitled, but I felt a little not guilty.
I don't know what the right word is, but he
felt like, Wow, we didn't deserve that. Can I give
to somebody else who made who they need help? You know?
(08:57):
So with that in mind, I got back to my car.
We started driving home. We were talking about, Wow, you
don't see that every day, you know, a store like
HGB just did that for its customers. So I told
my wife, I said, I'm going to write about this
story and I'm going to post it on Facebook and
just share with a few of my friends.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And you've been listening to Tim Hennessy tell the story
of an experience in a grocery store when we come
back to Texans here on our American Stories and we
(09:39):
continue with our American stories. And when we last left off,
Tim Hennessy was about to post his experience in that
grocery chain on Facebook, and let's pick up what's him.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
This last year, we've gotten bombarded with nothing but bad news,
and maybe even the last decade or two, it just
seemed like we get more and more bad news because
I just saw that as this is the America that
I know and love and that's what I was going
to tell the story. This is the America I know
and love, not the stuff you see in the newspaper,
(10:11):
on the news all day, you know, all the time.
So and my wife was thinking about it for a second.
She said, why don't you just call it the heart
of America? And I just liked what she said. It
just hit me at them. I said, you know what,
that's what I'm going to call it because it kind
of is more succinct. This is the heart of America.
It truly is. So then she said, you know, I
took tim I took a picture and I said you did.
(10:34):
She goes, yeah, I didn't really want people to know
who's taking it, and she said, I just want. Through
her tears, she said, I'm I just captured that moment
for us. It was just a unique thing to see.
I said, well, send me that picture. I'll include that
with the post. And I literally just wrote it. I
actually gave it to my wife in a word document.
She's my editor because I'm not the best speller. I
(10:56):
hate to admit that I read voraciously, but I can
not spell. For nothing. Thank you God for a spell check,
Like the word separate, forget it. I put an EAI,
I don't know if it's e in the middle A. Anyway,
I'm getting off topic here, so she's edited for me,
and I just posted it and then I think our
(11:17):
power went out again a little while later, and then
we woke up on that Wednesday after I posted it,
and then sometime in the middle of the day, I thought, well,
we checked my Facebook post just to see, if you know,
a couple of hundred my friends what they thought of
that story. And I thought, oh my, how does this happen?
(11:38):
At that time, it was like twelve or thirteen thousand shares,
a couple thousand comments, and probably ten thousand likes. And
I'm like, oh, I don't have that many friends. How
does this happen? How does this happen? And I actually
called a friend of my daughters who works for Facebook,
and I said, Jesse, what the heck? And she says,
(12:00):
what the heck? I said, well, you're supposed to, you're
the expert. Don't tell me what the heck? How does
this happen? And she said, I don't know. Tim. I
think the story hit a nerve at the right time.
I think people needed to hear good news through all this.
So then then I got worried. Okay, I did not
expect this to go like this. I was literally sharing
(12:22):
with a few friends. So I got worried. So I
called the store said have you heard about a Facebook
post about your store going viral? He goes, yes, we did.
I said, is it okay? And it was a manager.
I asked for it, and I said is it okay?
Because I didn't really I didn't know this was going
to happen. I didn't want to get anybody in trouble.
He said, no, it's all good, sir. I got the
(12:44):
impression without him saying that that is a very positive
thing for that store. Right. So, but I wanted to
call their corporate office too, for a couple of reasons.
One I wanted to double check that it was okay,
and two I wanted to find out what their chair
these were. And so I got ahold of somebody there
and they said the local food Bank is one of
(13:06):
their charities. And also they directed me to their website,
and she also mentioned this place called Lady Lodge. It's
a family Christian based camp where people go and the
donations help pay for families who can't afford it, and
there's no cell service or internet. It's literally you're going camping,
and it's a few hours away from us here in Texas.
(13:26):
And so my wife and I wrote checks to both
of them for more than what we would have paid
in groceries, because we felt like this was such a
great gesture. It was our way of giving back somehow, right.
But the next day that story just kept getting bigger
and bigger, and it was over thirty thousand shares, thirty
two hundred comments, more likes than I could ever count.
(13:48):
And then the phone started ringing. I got text messages,
email messages, direct messages from various news organizations, CNN, Watching Post,
Fox News, NBC, People Magazine, basically the who of media.
And then I still got a little bit nervous about
it because I thought, well, I don't want this company.
(14:09):
This is a very private company, very humble company. They
do a lot for the community, HIV does a lot.
They're almost always whenever there's a disaster, they're almost always
the first there for water or food supplies. They very
generous company in Texas, family oriented, And so I called
them one more time. I said, you know, i've been
(14:31):
doing these interviews. I don't know if anybody saw it,
But have somebody call me back and let me know
if you want me to continue or stop, because I'll
stop today because it's not about me. I just wanted
to not necessarily promote the store, but just to show
the goodness that there is in this country, because there's
a lot of good things in this country. We see
it every single day. We see it all across this country.
(14:55):
We see it in our neighborhoods. How many of us
go out every day we help somebody, But it doesn't
make the news because that's what that's what we're supposed
to do. That's what God wants us to do. That's
why we're here. We're here to be good to each other. Right.
And so they called me back, one of their corporate
spokespeople call me back. I don't know if it's the
next day or that same day, I can't remember. And
(15:16):
we talked about a half hour on the phone, and
he said, Tim, he goes, let me just tell you something,
he goes, We're not going to stop what you're doing.
We love what you're doing. When we're getting a lot
of phone calls right now about if that story is
true or not, and all we do is tell them, yes,
it happened, but that's as far as they go. And basically,
(15:39):
because they don't want to toot their own horn. They
could easily they could easily point to their back and go,
look at the name of the my back of my jersey.
This is a g B. Aren't we great? But that's
not what they want to do. That's how great of
a company they are. Oh, I wanted to add one
more thing. So and this is for my wife. Just
(16:00):
give her credit. This is my wife, Debbie. I have
to give her a credit for this because this is her.
She says this all the time, and that's why she
took that picture too. She says this following phrase. God
only needs a moment, right, God only needs a moment?
(16:23):
And and and in the phrase that I One of
my favorite quotes that I kind of lived my life
by is from Albert Einstein, and it goes like this,
live your life is if there are no miracles, or
everything is a miracle. I probably boss that quote little
nervous right now, but so I live it as if
(16:44):
everything's a miracle. And when you look for good things,
you look for the miracles in life. It may seem
silly to go, Wow, you think it's a miracle. This
guy let everything, these people walk out the store. I
think it is. That's what we look or the moments.
And again I got to give my wife credit for
a God only needs a moment. You look for these things,
(17:05):
you see them everywhere. They don't get reported all the time,
but we see him. And I'll give you an example
of another moment or a miracle happened during the same
week I saw the story. It was in San Antonio, Texas.
I believe it was a seven eleven and there's either
the owner or the manager who wrote this on Twitter.
(17:28):
And she went to her store one morning and all
the water that's left out outside on palettes was missing.
She said, over one hundred cases of water we're missing.
And she thought, well, I guess people needed water because
we're having issues. So she understood it. And she goes
(17:50):
to open the door of the seven eleven and there
on the floor was six hundred and twenty dollars in
all kind of different denominational bills. So in other words,
it wasn't just one person who just put in six
hundred twenty dollars. They put they slid through the slit
of the door, not like a mail slot, you know,
like some doors a mail the slit of the door.
They slid in six hundred and twenty dollars in ones, twos, tens, twenties,
(18:14):
and there's a picture of it. That is a miracle. Right,
So we see these all over the place. And I'll
give a couple other example. I don't know if it's
a great example, but in my neighborhood and probably all
across Texas, people were out walking u driving when we
could going house to house checking out people. How are
(18:37):
you doing? Did you know you can melt snow and
ice to flush to put in the back of your
toildt to flush you I didn't know that. Okay, great,
And we see this everywhere all over this country. Like
I said, thousand times a day. How many times have
you heard of a police officer And this happens all
the time. Maybe somebody stand in front of them doesn't
have enough money to pay for their food or whatever,
(18:57):
and that officer, they're not gonna make it the most
money in the world, will take out their own money
and pay for that. Right. Every once in a while
we hear that story, But that happens all the time.
Those kind of things. So miracles do happen every single day.
This world is a miracle, and we're all here, and
the sun rise every day and sets every day. We
(19:18):
take it for granted, but it's still a miracle. You know.
When I go turn the lights on now, I think
twice about it, because we didn't have it for a
few days. When I turned a faucet on, I think
twice about it now. A week ago it was like
not even in your mind. Those are miracles if you
(19:39):
think about it that way that some waters come from
some planet, it's treated the electricity is coming from someplace.
It comes into my place and it gives me light,
gives me the power of my refrigerator, my TV, my stove,
all these things. We take it for granted. We have
delegated so many things in our lives. Is just mundane.
But they're miracles.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
And you've been listening to Tim Hennessy The Heart of America,
a story of the Hennessy family and H. E. B.
A grocery chain that wanted nothing, no credit, no adulation.
They just did the right thing. This great story here
on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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