The following is a borrowed, but...

...comes directly from the source. I thought it was a great story:

"While driving home from Fort Chaffee on a Saturday afternoon, I was struggling to cope with the emotional stress and physical exhaustion that was starting to overcome me. I had been helping with the hurricane victim relief efforts for two and a half weeks and it was starting to wear me down.

As I turned on a street, I saw two little girls, storm victims, in front of a barracks waving a sign. The sign said, "Lemonade. . .25¢."

I was tired, hungry and not in the best of moods, so I drove by. And, when I did, I looked into the rearview mirror and saw the two little girls hang their heads in sorrow. And, suddenly a great feeling of remorse and remembrance came over me.

Pictures of my own youth were replayed in my head. I was six, maybe seven and my brother was a year younger than me. To pass the time during the summers, we spent hours upon hours catching crawdads in the ditch across from our house.

It was a way for us to stay barefoot and cool, and have a little friendly competition by seeing who had the fastest hands and who could catch the most crawdads.

One day, we decided that we could make a little spending money.

We drug our little chairs out of our bedrooms and across the street. Rolled one of my dad's big spools of wire over by the road and spent all morning painting a sign which read, "Crawdaddies. . .5¢ a peece."

We hung the sign over the spool of wire and for two hours, sat and watched car, after car, after car, after car just drive on by.

Nobody wanted to buy crawdads and we couldn't understand why. They were the perfect fishing bait, we reasoned.

After a while, we gave up and splashed back into the ditch.

Then, after we had forgotten all about the sign and were engrossed on looking for that next crawdad, an old beat up car drove up and stopped. We looked at the man with blank faces, wondering what he wanted. It took him two or three tries, but the man finally convinced us that he wanted to by our crawdads.

And, we could have walked across the water. We felt lighter than air. We were elated, thrilled and, in our eyes, rich beyond our wildest dreams. The man didn't just give us a nickel, he gave us a whole dollar. "See", we told each other, "now that's a man who knows how to fish."
For two weeks, we had our little crawdad stand by the roadside. And, for two weeks, our only customer was the man in the beat up old car. Then, something else captured our attention, and the crawdad stand went back to being a spool of wire and the now beaten up sign soon became a backboard for our basketball goal.

For twenty years, I never thought about that crawdad stand or the happiness we felt when we saw our only customer drive up. And then, fate brought me across a man who had also volunteered at the base to help the hurricane victims. One night, while down at the headquarters, we talked for awhile and I learned that he lived just a few streets down from our old house. While trying to recall people we both knew, the man told me about two little boys who had a crawdad stand he used to patronize.

Imagine my shock and surprise to learn that this man was that person who filled us with so much joy as kids. We laughed for awhile and I asked him what he did with all of those crawdads he bought.

"Oh, I just let them go back in the ditch up the road," he said. "I just bought them because it made you guys smile."

And, all of this went through my mind in a microsecond as I stared in the rearview mirror at the two little girls with their heads lowered in disappointment. And, when I stopped my truck and backed up to them, I have never felt so much joy flow over me as I watched those little girls smile from ear to ear, jump up and down and run to their little lemonade stand. The sign said a quarter, and I gave them a dollar.

I considered it a repayment on a debt I owed to a man who never went fishing with crawdads.

1st John 3:13-20 tells us that Christ is love, compassion, and joy. He is the hope in our lives and the grace by which we live. And, He can be found in everything we do, and everything we say. Even, in a tall glass of lemonade. Or a dirty old jar of crawdaddies."