Maria Balboa is a student at TX A&M Corpus Christie and works at an H-E-B Grocery bagging groceries to help pay for school. Last Monday a grandmother was checking out with her two grandsons and realized that she didn’t have enough funds on her SNAP card to pay for her groceries.
The woman said she was going to put back everything except what her family needed for dinner that night. But then Balboa stepped in, asking how short the woman was. She was told by the cashier that it was $137, and even though it was a lot of money for Balboa, she felt the right thing to do was to offer to pay for the groceries. The woman tried to refuse, but Balboa insisted and paid.
Balboa later posted about the incident on social media. Apparently, the grandmother was struggling to support her family and was so touched by Balboa’s kindness that she wrote in to H-E-B management to praise the young woman. She was called into her manager's office and thought she might be in trouble, but in fact, her manager reimbursed her for the groceries and gave her a goody basket from the company to show their appreciation. Balboa tells KZTV “In that moment, I really felt God telling me to pay for the groceries. I felt a chill in my fingertips, and I didn’t know what it was in the moment. After talking about it with one of my good friends, she told me, ‘yeah, that was God.'” Maria ends her interview by asking for everyone to “always be good to the people around you, because you never know what someone else might have going on.”
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