After yesterday’s A Simple Gift feel good, holy moment story, I have to follow up with another one from an unlikely source: a stressed out lady who teaches de-stressing techniques for a living. Rebecca Heiss opens her story this way:

I was pacing the lobby of a Big Island hotel in flip-flops, panic rising in my chest like mercury in a thermometer. My luggage had vanished somewhere between the continental U.S. and Hawaii, and in less than 24 hours I was supposed to deliver a keynote speech to a room full of suits. The irony was not lost on me: Here I was, a stress physiologist who studies how humans handle pressure, completely undone by a missing suitcase. – Rebecca Heiss, I Study Stress. This Cure Surprised—and Helped—Me, Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2025

A hotel employee had a car take her to nearby shops which sold nothing but touristy stuff – no business suits. The story picks up:

Then in the last shop something extraordinary happened. The woman behind the counter listened to my predicament and chuckled, “Oh sweetie you aren’t going to find what you need here.” She handed me the keys to her brand-new BMW convertible and gave me directions to shops that sold business attire 40 minutes away. “Just bring it back when you’re done,” she said with a smile. 

Wow. A holy moment (and I have no idea whether or not the store clerk is a believer).

The story continues with a remarkable insight on one way to overcome stress:

I returned hours later, outfit secured and overcome with gratitude. Through tears, I asked the woman—her name, it turned out, was Tani—why she had done this. “That’s how we take care of people here in Hawaii,” she answered.

Then she revealed something deeper. “I’ve been stressed lately,” she admitted. She was worried about her daughter, who had just moved back to the continental U.S.: “My hope is that somebody might do something similar for her if she was in the same circumstance.”

When I returned to the hotel, the hotelier was eager to hear how my trip had gone. As I recounted Tani’s extraordinary kindness, tears welled up in his eyes. Minutes later, an elaborate display of chocolates arrived at my room, accompanied by a two-page note. He explained that he’d been anxious about moving his family to Hawaii, but my story story had quieted his stress.

In the self-help field, we tend to promote the usual stress-management arsenal: meditation apps, massage therapy, breathing exercises, yoga classes. These aren’t wrong, but they rely on the individual to solve their own stress…A study of workplace interventions to reduce stress, published in Industrial Relations Journal in 2024, revealed a startling truth: Of the 90 different stress-reduction strategies tested in corporate settings, which included meditation, massage and breathing exercises, only one consistently mitigated the negative effects of stress: serving others.

My Hawaiian crisis had become an impromptu case study. People experiencing their own stress had all instinctively relieved this pressure by helping someone else…This helped me see how we’ve been approaching stress relief backward. Instead of turning inward with bespoke wellness practices, we do best when we turn outward—toward the needs of others…In a world obsessed with self-optimization and individual wellness solutions, the most radical act might be the simplest one: noticing when someone else needs help, and then providing it. – Rebecca Heiss, emphasis mine.

Wow. Where to start? “noticing when someone else needs help, and then providing it” sounds a lot like

• Be there
• Pay attention
• Do what you can…

Which I’ve written about before.

And the whole idea of helping others comes right out of Philippians. As usual, God (and the Apostle Paul) are ahead of the curve:

Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others. (Philippians 2.4, NKJV)