While it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the bad news being thrown at us all the time, it’s important to remember that goodness is all around us and little miracles are happening every day.
One of these miracles happened to 71-year-old Bill Sumiel, a Christian man from New Jersey who was desperately in need of a kidney transplant.
On October 30, 2021, Sumiel was picked up from a dialysis center in Newark, Delaware by an Uber driver named Tim Letts.
While on the 30-minute drive to Sumiel’s home in Salem, New Jersey, the pair got to talking and Sumiel told Letts about his serious need for a kidney transplant, a procedure that he had been needing for over three years.
About halfway through the car ride, Letts told Sumiel, “I think God must have put you in my car,” and amazingly offered to donate one of his kidneys.
“[He said] if you’ll take my name and number, I’ll give a kidney to you,” Samuel recalled in an interview with ABC6. “I was shaking so hard I couldn’t even write down his name and number.”
Letts, a US Army veteran, kept his word and later went to get tested to see if his blood and tissue type were compatible for a donation to Sumiel, which they were.
When explaining his thought process to Town Square Delaware, Letts later said that he was “inspired by how genuine” Sumiel was.
“He was happy. He was kind and you could tell he was suffering, but he didn’t let that fact protrude,” said Letts.
“I didn’t want to look in the mirror later down the road and think, ‘Wow, man, you suck. You could have done something and you didn’t, because you talked yourself out of it or because you let other people talk you out of it,'” Letts said. “Good people need good people to stand by them, and don’t call yourself a good person if you’re not willing to stand by another good person.”
The pair went through with the kidney transplant, which was successful.
“Giving a kidney is the gift of life and I feel so fortunate to have that gift,” Sumiel later said. “I can almost live my life back to normal.”
“I know miracles have happened in the past. Maybe they never happened to me, maybe they have. But now I really have those beliefs reinforced.”
Letts has since moved to Germany, but the pair still keep in touch and say they will be lifelong friends.
“I don’t think that politics of background really define whether two souls can be friends or not,” Letts said. “I saw somebody that I felt a connection to, somebody that I felt I could make a difference for.”
