Homeless woman receives winter clothes from stranger, offers boots in return

Homeless woman receives winter clothes from stranger, offers boots in return

(Kelly McGuire/Facebook)


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CHICAGO — A woman's act of kindness was instantly returned when the woman to whom she offered her warm winter boots gave her something special in return.

Kelly McGuire was leaving a Chicago Bears football game with her husband and friends over the weekend when she noticed a homeless woman sitting outside in the cold, according to ABC News. At first, she didn't want to stop. But she couldn't ignore the voice inside her head.

"I had passed countless amounts of homeless people all day, but for some reason I was so drawn to this woman," McGuire wrote in a Facebook post.

So she walked across the street to talk to the woman — Amy — who was holding a sign requesting winter clothing and boots.

"I was brokenhearted for her," McGuire told ABC. "My initial reaction was, 'That could be any one of my friends or my family.' We have an obligation to help everyone we can because we never know when it's going to be us."

As luck would have it, McGuire had bundled up in multiple layers for the game that night and removed most of those layers at dinner and placed them in her bag.

"I wore Under Armor pants and an Under Amor long-sleeved shirt along with 2 additional pairs of pants, 4 shirts, 2 sweatshirts, 3 pairs of socks, 2 pairs of gloves, a coat, a hat, a scarf and my favorite new pair of winter boots," she wrote on Facebook.

When McGuire asked Amy what size boots and clothing she wore, she was surprised to find out they were the same size.

**edit** Sweet friends, I had no idea this post was going to go so viral. My heart wants to explode from all of the...

Posted by Kelly McGuire on Sunday, January 3, 2016

"I handed her the bag of clothing and winter items that I had taken off and Giordanos, and my leftover pizza, and told her that I would like to give her my boots," McGuire wrote. "She stood up and cried. I sat down with her, untied my boots, slid off the top layer of my fuzzy socks and handed them to her. She said they were the nicest shoes she's ever seen."

Just as McGuire was about to run back to the train station in her socks, Amy called out to her, offering up her own worn and wet winter boots.

"She, who had nothing, offered me these boots. HER boots," McGuire wrote. "I wore them all the way home. Her name was Amy and I just cannot stop thinking about her."

McGuire posted a photo of the tattered boots along with her account of the experience. The post has been shared nearly 10,000 times.

"I think we can all learn something so special from the fact that Amy offered me her boots," McGuire said.

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