According to Josiah’s mother, Ava Faulk, when Josiah saw the disheveled-looking man with a bike holding a bag outside a Waffle House restaurant in Prattville, Alabama, he appeared deeply troubled and simply wouldn’t stop asking his mother questions about the man, wondering why he looked so disheveled.
Faulk explained to her son that the disheveled man was homeless. But Josiah did not understand what it means to be homeless.
He asked his mother, “What does that mean?”
According to WSFA, Faulk explained to her son as simply as she could, saying that being homeless means you don’t have a home and it often means you don’t have enough food to eat.
Still failing to comprehend the full implication of what it means to be “homeless,” the boy asked, “Where is his house? Where is his family? Where does he keep his groceries?”
But from his mother’s explanation, Josiah was able to grasp the key point that the man did not have enough food to eat. So, he pleaded with his mother to buy the man a meal at the restaurant, according to WBTV.
His mother agreed and asked the man to come in. But when he came into the restaurant and sat down, nobody waited on him. So Josiah ran up to the man and asked if he needed a menu, explaining that you need a menu to be served at the restaurant.
Cautious about exploiting their generosity, the unidentified homeless man asked only for a cheeseburger, but Faulk told him that he could have anything he wanted.
The man asked, hesitantly, “Can I have bacon?”
Faulk told him he could have as much bacon as he wanted.
But as the man prepared to tuck into his meal, little Josiah insisted that he wanted to “say the blessing with him.”
And while other customers watched, Josiah sang the “blessing” aloud: “God our Father, God our Father, we thank you, we thank you. For our many blessings, for our many blessings, Amen, Amen.”
Josiah’s kind-hearted actions brought diners at the Waffle House close to tears. Her mother told WSFA, “The man cried. I cried. Everybody cried.”
The photo showing Josiah standing at the homeless man’s table has gone viral online.
The homeless man ate his meal and left the restaurant satisfied. Faulk left the restaurant with her son, deeply touched by her precocious boy’s display of deep faith through a selfless act.
Faulk told WSFA that she would never forget the incident at the Waffle House restaurant.
“You never know who the angel on Earth is, and when the opportunity comes you should never walk away from it. Watching my son touch the 11 people in that Waffle House tonight will be forever one of the greatest accomplishments as a parent I’ll ever get to witness.”
The Mirror Online observes that Josiah’s action contrasts sharply with an incident earlier in the week in which a McDonald’s in Manchester refused to serve a homeless man whose meal a teenager had offered to pay for.
