Then we have Virginia Saenz. Let’s say one day you get a wrong number phone call from a total stranger. It’s a woman who leaves a nonsense message on your voice mail, addressing a person who doesn’t live there, with a message that goes something like this: “I can send you money for groceries, but that won’t leave me enough to pay my mortgage this month, and the house is already in foreclosure.”

Saenz, a real estate agent whose only connection to these people was that her phone number was a couple of transposed digits away from theirs, could have just deleted the message. Or, if she was motivated to be a good Samaritan, Saenz could have called the person back to let her know she had gotten the wrong number, so she’d know that the person she had intended to call would never hear her message.

But instead, Saenz called the stranger back and said, “I’ll take care of the groceries, don’t worry about it.” The lady, Lucy Crutchfield, had meant to leave a message for her daughter. Saenz contacted the daughter and bought her and her family enough groceries to get them through the end of the month, allowing Crutchfield to pay her mortgage.

There are people who make a habit of this sort of thing, by the way. In Tennessee, a group of nine women have been running a secret charity for decades, just prowling around the city looking for strangers who’d had their power turned off, or who had just had a death in the family, whatever. Then they’d sneak by their home in the wee hours of the morning and drop off envelopes of cash and a freshly baked cake. Over the decades they’ve dispensed nearly a million freaking dollars this way.

6 True Stories That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity