Imagine life as you know it—your spouse, money, and security, vanishing right before your eyes. That’s exactly what happened to Lissa Engle just a few years ago.
“It was very hard. I went into depression," she said.
While Engle’s life has been met with many hiccups and hardships, she’s always made it a point to find ways to turn a negative into a positive.
"Now I just keep living and just being happy and positive and doing the right thing. And hopefully it will come back to me.”
It's that attitude that prompted her decision about whether to return a wallet full of money and credit cards. In her mind, there was only one option.
“It's like I found it and yeah it had a lot of things in it, and I could've, like I said I'm having it rough too, and I could've done that, but that wasn't the right thing to do," she said.
The Wallet belonged to Westpark resident Kerry Riter, who had been franticly searching for her lost item for hours.
“When you lose something like that you're frantic and you just want to find it," Ritter said. "You're trying to think about everything that you have to do and what could possibly happen and it's really, you know it's scary."
By the time her wallet was returned to her, it was late in the evening, and being so overcome by gratitude and shock, she never got the opportunity to get the name of the woman who was so kind to return her prized possession. So she took to social media.
“As she returned it you really think wow, there really are good people in this world. To have the one person that would return it, I think I'd want her to know that she really had an effect on our family you know, because it allowed me to teach an important lessons to my children."
Kerry posted on the Westpark Community Facebook page to find the good Samaritan, but had no luck.
That's when we stepped in to help coordinate a surprise visit this afternoon.
And Lissa Engle was completely surprised. “Her coming here, that shocked me and I was very glad to meet her and actually get to talk to her."
It’s moments like these that Riter says Christmas is all about.
“It's really easy to be like, oh you know Christmas is about presents and parties and things like this, but really, I mean, it's a spirit of giving. And sometimes you can give in ways of doing, you know, going out of your way to do something nice for somebody. It was a nice Christmas gift this year."
