LINCOLN, Neb. – One very happy waitress got a life changing tip earlier this month from two customers asking some pretty invasive questions about her life.
According to the Lincoln Journal Star, a man and his friend entered the Cracker Barrel and asked the hostess to seat them with the restaurant’s grumpiest server. The hostess informed them that no one was grumpy at the restaurant and sat them with who she said was their happiest server.
The hostess sat the two customers with Abigail Sailors, an 18-year-old college student who was working the lunch shift that day. They ordered their meals and then began asking her questions about her life and why she was so happy.
Although hesitant at first, eventually Sailors spoke about her past, and gave the two an overview of her life, which wasn’t what they initially expected. Sailors had had a pretty rocky past. When she was a baby, her parents had been in a car accident. As a result, her mother suffered a brain injury which she never fully recovered from. With her dad considered unfit to be a parent, the incident eventually landed her and her four older siblings in foster care.
While in foster care, Sailors and her siblings endured abuse by their foster father who was eventually arrested and sentenced to prison. Eventually, after the siblings were split up by the state, Sailors and two of her siblings ended up back in the care of their biological father, who was then also arrested for abuse.
The five siblings all found stability about nine years ago when John and Susi Sailors adopted them and raised them as their own.
“It’s a great home, great people, amazing,” Abigail, who took their last name, told the Lincoln Journal Star. “I don’t know how I would have turned out if I didn’t have them. They shaped the person I am today.”
Through persistent questioning, her two customers learned that Sailor had just finished her first semester at Trinity Bible College in North Dakota, where she was studying youth ministry and psychology. Since she was paying her own way through college and could afford it, she was forced to put things on hold for the spring semester in order to work and save up money.
When the two men were finished with their meals, one of the men pulled out a check book and informed Sailor that he was an alumni of her college and that he would like to help her pay for tuition. The man wrote a check to her school for $5,000, and then wrote another made out to her for an additional $1,000. Then he left a $100 tip which he requested she split with one other server who had helped them.
“I couldn’t believe it. I tried to thank them, and they said, ‘thank God,’” said Sailor.
