Jeff Louis, a pizza delivery guy for Gionino’s Pizzeria, had no idea what he was in for when he set off to deliver eight pizzas to the Life Point Church in Mentor, Ohio. What appeared to be a routine delivery would turn into an amazing offering of generosity that snowballed into a “divine intervention.” According to the church’s pastor, Ken Wright, “When Jeff arrived, we asked him to deliver one pizza to me on the platform, where I had already planned on giving him a $100 tip.” Louis was apprehensive about going before the entire congregation to make his delivery. “I was like weirded out. Like why? This is so weird,” Louis said.
When Louis arrived at the pulpit, the pastor handed him a very generous $100 tip and asked the congregation, “If anyone else wants to participate, please come up.” Churchgoers lined up to fill the collection plate for Louis. The collection amounted to an unbelievable $700. Not bad for just eight pizzas. What the congregation didn’t know was that Louis is a recovering addict who really needed the money. “I’ve been having such a hard time lately, just struggling to stay clean and everything,” Louis said in a video he posted on YouTube. “I’m just trying to get my life back and it just really, truly amazes me that people who don’t even know me just wanted to help me out that much.”
The congregation’s generosity and Louis’ reaction to it have shaken up his life for the better. After the media grabbed hold of the story and 3.6 million viewers saw it on YouTube, it attracted the attention of Richard Taite, CEO of Cliffside Malibu, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center that’s one of the top treatment centers in the nation. “He looked like he really wanted it, and I wanted him to have access to it,” Taite said. A stay at Cliffside Malibu can run between $58,000 and $88,000 a month. “People die from prescription drug overdoses and addiction all the time. This is a guy now who has the opportunity to get well and be the human being that he was always meant to be before being derailed by the drugs and alcohol in the first place… Rest assured, he’s going to have a good life,” Taite said.
What started as a simple pizza delivery become an unbelievable outpouring of generosity and a potentially life-saving gift. And to think, Gionino’s Pizzeria was the third place the church called for pizza that fateful day. “It was the only one that said that it would be able to deliver early. Jeff was really struggling that morning and even contemplated not coming into work, but he committed himself to getting the pizzas to us early,” Wright said.
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(H/T WKYC)
