The man got the mind-boggling tip after delivering a $12.5 (€9.8) order at the Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion

Oct 10, 2014 18:57 GMT  ·  By

Earlier this week, on Wednesday, a pizza delivery man in Indiana, US, was handed a $1,248 (€980) tip, together with $70 (€55) in gift cards and hundreds of inspirational notes, as a thank you for having delivered a $12.5 (€9.8) order.

The Domino's Pizza employee, identified as James Gilpin, received the tip, the gift cards and the inspirational notes from students at the Indiana Wesleyan University in the city of Marion.

Needless to say, the man was taken quite by surprise. In fact, the says that it took him about two hours to come to terms that he had been handed a fairly impressive pile of cash without warning and completely out of the blue.

A life lesson we could all use

As detailed by ABC News, the entire affair started when over 3,000 students gathered in a chapel at the Indiana Wesleyan University in order to attend the mandatory weekly service. This Wednesday, the topic was “Do for one what you wish you could do for everyone.”

Shortly after the service began, speaker Keith Newman paused, pulled out his phone and ordered two pizzas from Domino's. While waiting for the food to arrive, he asked the students attending this meeting to donate the money that they would want to receive as a tip.

Besides, he asked each of them to write an inspirational note on a piece of paper. Once the students were done turning their pockets inside out and composing the messages, Keith Newman collected the money and the notes. He then waited for the pizza delivery man to arrive.

Almost immediately after he arrived at the chapel, Domino's employee James Gilpin was asked to join Keith Newman on stage. Eventually, he was handed the $1,248, the gift cards and the inspirational notes donated by the students.

“When I do any kind of teaching, I try to use stories because that's the way I learn. I think stories are great, but if you can show somebody a story, it's even more powerful,” Keith Newman told the press in an interview.

“And if you can involve them in the story, it's even more powerful. So we had the chance to act out a story,” he further commented on his decision to pull this little stunt during this Wednesday's service.

Nothing short of a shock

The pizza delivery man says that, at first, he didn't even really understand what was happening. In fact, he claims that it took him about two hours to wrap his head around the idea that, for some reason, a bunch of perfect strangers had handed him a whole lot of money.

“I thought it was very nice for an average Joe like me to get something like that. They didn't know me from me Adam, and they just picked me out random and handed me the money. It was really nice,” James Gilpin said.

The really lucky pizza delivery guy is understood to have two young children, of which one is 5 years old and the other is 6. The man says that he wants to use some of the money he got from the students to fix his car and whatever is broken in his home, and that he will use the rest to buy Christmas presents for his kids.