Our conscience is the measure of the honesty of our selfishness. Let us listen to it carefully as the foundation stones for a balanced success are honesty, character, integrity, faith, love and loyalty.

Honesty and integrity are absolutely essential for success in all areas of life. The really good news is that anyone can develop them both. Others tend to look to us with admiration and they try to emulate us for it is contagious, like what happened in the following display of honesty, kindness and more, by Bobby Puryear.

As the story goes, Bobby Puryear was stopping by a drive-through ATM one holiday season when he put in his card and noticed that there was already money in the money tray though he had not yet withdrawn any cash. Suspecting someone left it behind, he reached down to pick it up, and saw that he was holding a whopping $500. That was not an amount to turn our nose up at.

Without a second thought, he wanted the money to make it back to its owner, so he drove around to the bank in order to speak to someone. Inside, he told the teller he had found this money but the teller would not take it. Instead, she called the manager.

Do everything with a good heart and expect nothing in return, and you will never be disappointed.

The manager agreed to check who used the ATM right before him and took his contact information so the manager could keep him updated. The next day, while Puryear was at work, he got a call from the bank that they had located the owner of the missing cash. He ended up on a  three-way call with the manager and a 92-year-old woman named Edith.

Edith had taken out $500 for her monthly rent, which came to $480. Indeed, that $500 Puryear found made a world of difference to its owner. She was so thankful that she wanted to give him the $20 difference she had left after paying rent as a reward but he empathically said, “Absolutely not.”

As he got off the phone, he got to thinking that this elderly lady had only $20 to last her an entire month, that did not seem right to him. So he called the bank manager back, and told him to transfer $200 from his account to her account.  As he was doing so, a co-worker overheard him. A co-worker had heard the entire story and felt moved to give $100 as well. An hour later, he got another call from the bank manager who told him that he shared the story with all of the tellers and they came up with another $300 to go with the other money for Edith.

The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness. - Dalai Lama

Puryear’s thoughtful kindness ended up setting off a chain of events that no doubt made this woman’s month, and holiday season much brighter. The incredible act of kindness was posted to Facebook and then shared over 177,000 times over, around the world.  In today’s world, when everyone seems to only be looking out for oneself, that even such a small act like this, resonated with so many people’s hearts because it was genuine. This was just something small, but just imagine what kind of world we have if everybody would just do something like this to someone every day.

Puryear  got in touch with Edith and invited her for thanksgiving and she started crying. She said why did he want to be so nice to her and he said it was just the way he was raised and that, he would hope that someone would do that for him if he was in her situation.  As result of Puryear kindness a group of people in Modesto, California, meals on wheels provided her hot food and constantly checking to make sure she is doing fine. There are a lot of people out in our community who need help like Edith and it is a great opportunity to be able to help.

We learned about honesty, integrity and kindness; and that goodness of character is the best policy and no legacy is richer when we do it with sincerity.

By Tim Pedrosa