7/20/2026
Good Morning, My Dear Friends,
One of my heroes and inspirations in the Christian faith was the late Dr. Fred Craddock, who helped teach me how to be a preacher with his inductive and conversational style of preaching as story-telling. An example of this is found in a story he once shared.
Dr. Craddock said that when he was a little boy back during the depression years, his family lived in a little rented house in a small town in Tennessee, and the rent was $4.00 a week. The landlady would come every week to collect the $4.00. She didn’t collect it by the month; she got more if she collected by the week. The way his family got the $4.00 available is that they would all do a little work — sweep out the dime store uptown or mow cemetery lots, and whatever they collected they would put in a cereal box on the shelf and let it accumulate until they got $4.00, because every Saturday she would come.
Every once in a while, he said, his father would reach into the cereal box and go away into town. He would come back around dark, and come into the kitchen where his mother would be making supper. He would come up behind her, kiss her on the cheek, reach around, and put a package in front of her, wrapped in red ribbon — a bottle of perfume, or some candy, or some lotion. She would always start crying and say, “Why did you do that? You know we don’t have enough for the rent; you know we’re just barely making it,” and she would fuss, though her heart really wasn’t in the fussing. His father would always say, “You’re worth way more to me than what goes in and out of the cereal box. You need to have more than what life is giving us.”
Dr. Craddock went on to say that’s what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. When we get down on ourselves, when we think of the shape we’re in, the condition in which we find ourselves, it helps to remember God’s extension of profound, effusive, unmerited grace. “Grace to you.”
Is there anyone to whom you could not say that? Is there anyone to whom you could not show that? Those words could make a difference for someone. Probably the same difference it made to you, the first time someone said to you, “Grace to you and peace, in the name of God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
May we all learn how to say grace,
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
5501 Highway 55 East
Clover SC 29710
980-999-3500
