One early March morning, Matt was jolted awake by a fire alarm. Finding no fire, he decided to grab a coffee. Dressed casually with a backward cap, he walked to the nearest cafe, where a chance encounter with a young boy profoundly changed his outlook on life, humanity, and the world.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Juan Pablo Serrano
Upon reaching the cafe, Matt realized he had forgotten to pray that morning. So, he sneaked into a corner to fold his hands and pray. While he was standing with his eyes closed, a boy walked up to him and handed him a $1 bill, the only note he had at that time. "If you're homeless, here's a dollar," 9-year-old Kelvin Ellis Jr. said to Matt, "I always wanted to help a homeless person, and I finally had the opportunity," the boy recalled in a conversation with CBS.
Representative Image Source: Pexels | Goumbik
Kelvin's innocent assumption that Matt was homeless reflects the purity of a child's heart. Eager to help, he offered his only dollar—recently earned for good grades—to whom he mistakenly believed needed it most. He didn't know that Matt was anyone but a homeless man.
Not only is Matt not homeless, but the 42-year-old, whose full name is Matthew Busbice, is a millionaire. He is the owner of sporting goods store BuckFeather in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as well as the co-founder of Wildgame Innovations. He has made appearances on two reality TV shows. Despite having more than enough wealth, Matt never felt so rich as he did when the boy gave him the dollar bill, "I haven't had that much faith in humanity in a very long time," he shared.
Matt not only returned the bill but also decided to appreciate the boy for his generosity. He bought Kelvin breakfast and his father some coffee. He even took the boy on a 40-second shopping spree in which he could pick out whatever he wanted in BuckFeather, including a new bike. He had stumbled upon an unlikely friendship.
Kelvin felt excited but this was not what he had expected to get in return for his dollar. "Joy, because I helped someone," Kelvin said, "Give something away, and you feel like you've got a lot of things from it." Matt, on the other hand, was inspired by the boy’s selfless spirit because as a kid, he couldn’t grasp this idea of kindness.
The story of the inspiring little boy quickly spread across social media. @victoricruzz on X commented, “Sometimes the smallest acts can make the biggest waves.” @sadiesam1 wrote, “Happy tears. What a great kid!”
Image Source: YouTube | @meboneme1
Image Source: YouTube | @halonothing1
Speaking to Kelvin in an interview with WBRZ, Matt said, "You gave the only money in your pocket to me and thinking I was a homeless man, and that speaks volumes of your character and what this generation that's coming up." As Matt says, if there are more people like Kelvin, they will definitely change the world.
This article originally appeared 5 months ago.
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Pictured: A healthy practice?
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.