The Promposal of ALL Promposals – 5th Anniversary

Luis Velasquez, Jr., invites special education student, Tiffany Gay, to prom with an anazingly outlandish dream-of-a-lifetime promposal

If we are fortunate, we have the opportunity to elevate someone’s life in a special way, and that is particularly rewarding when that person is a total stranger.

I have never met Luis Velasquez and I hope that I do have that opportunity. Here’s the story that I was honored to help coordinate in a small, yet memorable way.

In mid-April of 2015, this story made headlines in USA Today, Huffington Post, Cosmopolitan, an on at least three TV network newscasts, plus YouTube. Cosmo wrote, “This is Easily the Most Tear-Inducing Promposal of All Time.”

The family’s Facebook page had over 3.2 million hits.

Natalia High School football player and cool (popular) guy, Luis Velasquez, did the most amazing and selfless thing – he invited the girl that nobody was likely to invite to the prom.

He treated Tiffany Gay like a princess as he assembled students for a fake fire drill that he had coordinated with the school administration. Tiffany, a special needs 16-year-old, had never gone on a date. Now, she would be going to prom with one of the most popular boys in school!

Have you ever read a story like this and wished you could somehow become involved? That happened to me as I wondered if I could find some special way to touch this situation.

Then a Godwink revealed itself. You see, the town where all this was happening was Natalia. And I actually had a client in Natalia!

My client, Emerald Foods, was the Wendy’s franchisee, and owned a Wendy’s inside the Love’s Travel Center in Natalia.

I enthusiastically called him and related the story about Luis and Tiffany. When he asked why I was calling him, I blurted out: “You need to become involved by paying for the limo to pick them up at home, take them to dinner at ANOTHER restaurant… and then deliver them to the prom.”

My client quickly became as excited as I was. I coordinated with the high school principal to ensure that this event would not compromise Luis’ future eligibility for athletic competition, and the prom night earned even more national publicity, plus local coverage from WOAI-TV in San Antonio.

When we shared our plan with Louis and with his and Tiffany’s families, they insisted that the dinner take place at Wendy’s. Our team did a magnificent job of decorating their private pre-prom dinner, and they headed into the limo with their Frosty frozen treats in-hand.

There are two lessons to learn from this experience:

1. There indeed are unselfish people like Luis Velasquez who care more about others than themselves.
2. God will reveal a way for us to become involved in moments that turn the focus away from us and toward Him. These are the Godwink moments when God is winking at us through how he involves us in His own story.

Christian author Henry Blackaby writes that we don’t have to start some sort of a Christian movement. We simply need to look around and find where God is doing something, and then join in.

Thank you to Luis for inspiring each of us with his kindness and caring, and thank you to Mark George, owner of Emerald Foods in Houston, for providing the limo that topped off the evening.

This was THE promposal of ALL promposals!

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