Several years ago Arnold Honda’s client called the financial adviser to say she wanted to cancel her life insurance policy.

The woman’s husband had walked out, and she was left with two small boys, a pile of bills and scant resources to make ends meet.

Honda listened to the woman’s litany of debts — then turned her argument around.

“I told her, ‘You just gave me all the reasons why you can’t cancel it. If you’re gone, who’s going to pay them for those boys?'”

It was a neat little rhetorical reversal, but what was most revealing about Honda came next.

“So I told her not to worry about, that we’d take care of it,” Honda recalls. “I knew she was a great mother, and I knew she was having a hard time. I told her not to worry about paying me back, but maybe sometime in the future she could do something for someone else.”

Such altruism may not be ideal for business, but makes perfect sense for someone who works so that he may give.

Honda, 58, grew up in a lower-middle-class area of Los Angeles, where he learned to view poverty as a cycle and those who suffer its deprivations as human beings in need of a hand.

Community service has always been Honda’s way of expressing his belief in human interconnectedness. Some of his first interactions with people from Hawaii came during college when he volunteered to visit Hawaii convicts housed in a California prison.

A graduate of UCLA and Hastings College of Law, Honda also gave time to the Legal Aid Society, Nihonmachi Legal Outreach and other organizations before finding work as an agent for Transamerica Life Insurance Cos. in 1983. He moved to Hawaii and joined Occidental Underwriters of Hawaii a few years later.

Now a divorced father with three grown children, Honda continues to serve the needy. For the last several years, he and his kids have served hundreds of hot, home-cooked Thanksgiving and Christmas meals to homeless people in Ala Moana Park and other areas.

“It doesn’t cost anything to care about other people,” Honda says.

But back to that woman who wanted to cancel her life insurance. She called Honda a while back to let him know that she had completed a nursing program and that both of her boys had made it to college. More important, she wanted to let him know that there was a woman at work who had lost her husband and was going through a rough time and how she was helping this woman get through it, just as Honda had once helped her.

“Wow,” Honda says. “I told her she’d just paid me back 10 times.”