The last time I saw Kathy Felton, she was living out of a motel room on little hope. Actually, Ms. Felton was homeless. She’d just lost her home of more than 20 years to foreclosure. Her son’s credit card was the only cushion between her and the street.

Paying for a room that costs $50.75 a day maxes out a credit card pretty quickly, especially at 15 percent interest plus tax. It adds up faster than the numbers on a gas pump.

Ms. Felton’s luck ran out the same time her son’s card maxed out. She wound up living on prayer at the Salvation Army.

I wrote her story. God did the rest.

Kari Kinion wanted to give her mother, Tyra White, a surprise birthday by inviting Ms. Felton, her mother’s old friend and her godmother, up to her home in Sully, Iowa. She repeatedly called and e-mailed Ms. Felton’s home, but no one answered.

“It wasn’t like Kathy to not call back,” Mrs. Kinion said.

So Mrs. Kinion Googled her godmother’s name on the Internet. She found a story I had written about Ms. Felton losing her home. At about that same time she read the story, Ms. Felton got a chance to catch up on her e-mails from a friend’s computer.

“Not 20 minutes after reading your article she e-mailed me from a friend’s place and it had a phone number on it,” Mrs. Kinion told me over the phone yesterday.

She called the number. Ms. Felton answered the phone. God answered.

Mrs. Kinion told her godmother to pack her bags. She and her husband took a three and a half hour drive to St. Joseph, where they picked up Ms. Felton from the Salvation Army at 12:30 a.m. the next morning. They also got furnishings out of storage and her beloved pets, a dog named George and cat named Kiki, out of the animal shelter.

It was really weird,” Ms. Felton said. “That day when she called, I don’t know if I was crying, but tears kept pouring out of my eyes.”

“She said she never prayed so hard in her whole life, then the phone rang and it was you offering to come get me,” Mrs. Kinion said.

Ms. Felton now spends time living between the homes of her friend Ms. White and Mrs. Kinion. All of them are currently working on getting Ms. Felton back on her feet and a permanent place to stay.

“I was so overwhelmed,” Ms. Felton said. “It’s still hard to digest it all.”

Newspaper men and columnists don’t make many friends. In covering our journalistic responsibilities as watchdogs for the public, we more often make more enemies than friends.

But our job is to help people, too. Sometimes it’s to lend an ear, sometimes a hand. Sometimes it takes carrying your heart instead of a sword along with paper and pen on a story.

In my 19-plus years here at the paper, I’ve been given plenty of opportunities to do just that.

Everyone knows that newspaper people don’t make a lot of money. But man, when it pays off in people you’re able to help, it’s the best-paying job in the world.

Alonzo Weston can be reached

at alonzow@npgco.com.