“What was the greatest surprise of your life,” a Harvard student asked Billy Graham three weeks ago. His answer took just two words: “Its brevity.”
Not surprisingly, this famous evangelist has found the passage of years swift. When you move around the world as often as he does, and have an appointment calendar as crowded as his, it must be hard to keep track of the years.
He has certainly come a long way from his boyhood, when he worked on his father’s dairy farm in North Carolina. He looks back on those days fondly, with two incidents in particular standing out.
When he was sixteen years old, he recalls, the first of two significant visitors came by. It was Babe Ruth and Billy got to shake hands with him.
Later, however, a second person arrived who was to have a incomparably more powerful impact on the young man. This visitor was a preacher who “spoke with tremendous conviction and urgency.”
At a meeting of some four thousand people, the preacher asked for anyone who felt moved to step forth and be born again. “I got up out of my seat,” Billy Graham recalls, “and stood in the front.” It was the moment when the direction of his whole life would be set.
“I had gone through a revolution, and become a new person,” he says of the experience. When he woke up the next day everything seemed different.
These are the vibrant recollections of a man now eighty years old. He has entered a new era when many things have become hard. Pain has become a constant companion. Of his Parkinson’s disease, Rev. Graham says, “It doesn’t kill people, it just makes them wish they were dead.”
Three years ago he fell and broke his back. Since then, he has again fallen eighteen or twenty times. To make matters worse, his wife has been hospitalized for several weeks. So Billy Graham knows at first hand the travails frequently associated with old age.
His spirit, however, remains clear and strong. As retired senator Alan Simpson said in introducing him, “He is a man of great passion and wisdom.”
I found it fascinating to watch him perform in a setting, the Kennedy School of Government, not famous for its compelling interest in religion. He delivered his formal speech there with unabashed advocacy for God and conviction that Jesus is the answer to basic human problems.
Speaking to the question “Is God relevant to the 21st Century?,” Rev. Graham dealt with three issues. First, human evil and the self-destructive habits that we cannot break. Graham’s answer?: The Bible says that the problem lies within the human heart and God alone can help us.
Billy Graham told his listeners that each one of them, whether they know it or not, yearns for God. He recalled Raisa Gorbachev once telling him, “You know I’m an atheist, but I cannot help but feel there is more out there.”
The second issue for Graham is human suffering. “I’ve never met a person in the whole world,” he said, “who didn’t have a problem.” But King David in the Bible suffered more than most people, yet he could ultimately say “The Lord is my shepherd.”
And, finally, comes death. Of his own, this confident evangelist says, “Right now, if I died, I know where I would go.”
Graham recommends this prayer of repentance: “God, I’ve broken your laws, by faith I give myself to you.” In response, he says that “God will come into your life and change it.”
The question period drew from students and others fervent expressions of esteem for the man. A divinity school student told him: “I love you, man of God.” Another person said, “Billy Graham is the most popular person in the eyes of man and God.”
A graduate student asked a challenging question: “Did your ministry avoid the big public issues?” Graham offered a disarming response saying “We cannot judge a man’s life until it’s completed. So many things I now wish I had done differently.”
The same divinity school student mentioned above asked a question that also challenged the Christian evangelist. “How does one make the call for Jesus Christ in an inter-faith environment?” To this Graham did not have much to say beyond “It’s the life you live.”
Pushing the same theme further another student asked, “Will God forget all who do not believe in Jesus Christ?” Graham replied that “God is a God of love and mercy, forgiveness and judgment.” He then added that the question itself can only be answered by God.
The session concluded with further praise for the world-famous evangelist, the friend and counselor to nine United States presidents. Said Alan Simpson: “I’d rather see a sermon any day instead of hearing one.”
Richard Griffin