A restaurant in Arkansas has been garnering praise for feeding a homeless man not just leftovers he requested, but a freshly-cooked meal.
A woman named Ronda Chung from Little Rock, Arkansas was visiting the El Sur Street Food restaurant in January of 2023 when she witnessed this wholesome scene unfolding. She posted a note on Facebook expressing her admiration for the restaurant, “El Sur Street Food Co. is the epitome of compassion and local love,” she wrote. According to her post, a homeless man stepped into the restaurant and asked if they had any leftover food.
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To his surprise, an employee behind the counter said, “I would love to pay for your food,” and asked if he would like to hear some recommendations. The employee suggested dishes like the popular "Con Todo baleada" instead of giving him cheaper items from the menu like chips and salsa, or a pupusa.
The restaurant worker asked the man if he wanted to eat at a table or wanted the meal packed. The man, abashed by his kind gesture, replied that he didn’t want to bother him. The employee answered, “I am not bothered by you being here,” and offered him a table.
The Facebook post has over 3.1k likes. People, most of them already impressed by the El Sur restaurant’s service, were touched by the kind-heartedness of this worker. A comment revealed that the name of this generous employee was Chris.
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Ronda’s post instantly became widespread all over social media. On X, several people reposted the story complimenting heartfelt messages about the restaurant employee. @_hoggystyle_ wrote, “If only everyone was as compassionate as this man!”
@lrproud501 quoted the story, “Man this made me smile and tear up at the same time.” Like Facebook, people on X too said they were eager to try eating out at the benevolent restaurant. @cierraclarkTV commented, “Love this! Now I have to try El Sur!” @jordandjones4 affirmed “Everybody go try El Sur!! Awesome food, and even more awesome people! They deserve all of our business!”
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The post was also shared byReddit group r/MadeMeSmile, where u/1outkastwill commented, “We need to make stories like this more common. I hope people in the community hit up this place and show support for this business. We need more people like this in the world.” “Thank you for sharing this with us. This is the kind of story that everyone needs to hear. Props to that restaurant worker for doing what he did to make that man feel like a human being,” added u/pilgrimpayne59.
The Arkansas restaurant mirrored the united strength of humanity by feeding the vulnerable man a good meal. If there were more restaurants like this, no soup kitchens would be required anymore. “This is the Arkansas I want,” Ronda wrote in her Facebook post.
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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.