This is a great topic!!!
I was on crutches from an accident, with tens of stitches in my knee, and was floored when a woman I barely knew (a friend of a friend), who appeared to be ready to give birth at any second, showed up with dinner. I felt like I should have been bringing HER dinner!!
I had knee surgery several years later, and a non-Jewish neighbor took me around in my mini-van so I could do my Shabbos shopping. For hours, negotiating mounds of snow…
I had to have surgery several months after moving hundreds of miles to a place where we knew almost nobody. For two weeks, people I didn’t know brought us food. It was supposed to have been outpatient surgery, but there were complications, and I was laid up much longer than I had planned on. One woman brought my kids home from school every single day. And, I still had a job when I had recovered.
When I was a little girl, my mom would send me to the store next door to get “one or two things”. Without fail, the person in front of me would let me go in front of them – “is that all you have?” Now I try to do the same (but there are express lines these days, so it doesn’t happen as much).