"i've always depended on the kindness of strangers." - tennessee williams

i just got off the phone with tony stover. tony lives in sevierville, tennesse. tony is a pretty cool guy. he proves that most people are, despite their shortcomings, essentially good.

a few weeks ago while on vacation, i fell off a boulder. yeah, a boulder. i landed several feet below on another boulder, located in the river that rushed through the chimneys (an area in the smokey mountains). to give you a visual, here is julie navigating around one of the rocks:

the mountains had experienced severe downpours for the previous twenty-four hours, so the water was moving extraordinarily fast, as you can see from the video below (excuse the fuzziness of the picture).

the boulders were also very slippery. i saw a rock that i wanted to get to, and told myself wisely not to jump to it. instead, i thought, i will take the safe way around...one step later found me five feet down, wedged between two boulders. my camera, which was strapped to my wrist, flew into the water as my hand bounced off the rock's surface. a knot instantly came up on my wrist, and the ribs on my upper left side were hurting terribly.

i was stunned at first, not realizing what happened. then, i frantically began looking for the camera, which julie saw fly into the river. (as most of you know, cameras and i just don't get along. i am ALWAYS dropping them!) i reached my arms down into the rushing water to no avail. i was panicked. i was in pain, and my camera was gone. gone. oh man. what a loser i was.

julie was calming and reassuring. i was lucky that i wasn't seriously hurt (as in, my head did not bounce off the boulder). we climbed up out of the river, dried ourselves off, and headed back to the motel.

fast-forward two days...

tony stover has taken his nieces and nephews hiking in the chimneys. about 200 yards downstream from where i had been, his nephew finds a camera wedged beneath a rock. tony told me on the phone, "i felt like God put the camera in my hands so i could return it to the owner. there were memories in that camera that you deserved to have back."

tony took my little cannon power-shot home, removed the memory card, which miraculously was still intact even though the camera was toast, and viewed the pictures on his computer. he noticed a red-headed girl with "waverly volleyball" written on a t-shirt. he saw another picture of a man (from our family reunion, which had occurred the day before we left on vacation) with a name tag on. he started researching the man's name and "waverly" and decided to call waverly high school in ohio.

tony was put in touch with our head volleyball coach, to whom he explained his story. the coach then called my niece, taylor, who was on vacation with us, and relayed this amazing tale...how a gentleman found my camera and actually wanted to return it. he even wanted to pay the postage without reimbursement.

true to his word, my broken camera and good memory card arrived in the mail about a week later. tony had paid $4.75 for shipping.

cut to today...

i spoke with tony for about 15 minutes this afternoon. super, super, super-nice guy. i told him my part of the story, then he explained his role. we talked about family (his father recently passed, and he is helping take care of his mother), and vacations, and strange coincidences. tony even invited me to his lutheran church; if i'm ever back in tennesse on a sunday morning or wednesday night, i am welcome to come in and make myself at home there.

i told tony our church believes that small things done with great love change the world.

he agreed whole-heartedly.

but i think i already knew that about him.

(p.s. both the picture and video in this post came from the broken camera that tony returned.)