Thank you, Billy, for being such a role model and a humble servant of our Lord Jesus Christ. Your dedication is such an inspiration and a breath of fresh air! I’m looking forward to seeing you in the Kingdom, along with your beautiful wife, Ruth. Keep pressing on; the best is yet to come!
Jerry
BILLY GRAHAM IS EVERYWHERE
My earliest remembrance of Billy Graham was in the early 1970s. My parents had banned film-going for their five kids, and yet one night our family walked into the “sin-ema” to watch a film called Time to Run. I was awestruck that Billy Graham could use this medium for God’s glory!
God used World Wide Pictures again in my life at age fourteen when I had decided to toss God and my parents’ beliefs out of my life. I was visiting a friend in New Jersey and he took me to see The Prodigal, about a rebellious man whose brother tries to love him back into the church. It was a very powerful film to a fourteen-year-old drug user who knew better. When I finally rededicated my life to Christ in 1985, at the age of seventeen, I chose to go into a Christian radio ministry near Detroit. I was able to honor Pastor Graham with a two-hour radio tribute on his seventieth birthday. The show featured George Beverly Shea, Cliff Barrows, Chuck Swindoll, Harold Lindsell, Gigi and Franklin Graham, John Pollack, Ernie Harwell (voice of the Detroit Tigers), and many, many more … giving honor to one to whom honor is due.
I now work for ABC Radio in Detroit. Just a few years ago, I heard that Billy Graham was coming to President Ford’s museum in Grand Rapids. My wife and I drove up there, and at the press conference I stood up and asked, “Dr. Graham, how have you been able to hang on to your integrity as a televangelist?” He replied, “I didn’t know I was just hanging on!”
I know it sounds corny, but one of the reasons I have kept my faith in Christ all these years is due to the consistency of Billy Graham. He has given me an example that it can be done—you can live the life you tell others about. Dr. Graham was never politically motivated or financially motivated; He was always just heart motivated.
JESUS SAVES!
My parents were born in Puerto Rico and went to New York City as young folks, where they got married and had four daughters. They both came from very poor circumstances and had hard, difficult lives, especially during the Depression.
My father was an alcoholic and an abuser. He had an extremely violent temper. When he was angry, or provoked for any reason, he beat his wife and he beat his children. He hurt or damaged anything in his path. I was the youngest of the daughters, so I had not only one person abusing me, but five. I was verbally and physically abused by my father, my mother, and three sisters, though not so much the older ones. Whenever anyone had a quarrel, I took the brunt of it. One of my sisters was three years older than me, and she abused me every day, even more than my parents.
But I was even more special than that. When I was born, and just a few weeks old, they put me in an orphanage. I’m not sure if they intended to give me up for good. However, at one year of age, on my birthday, they took me home from the orphanage. The story is that, when I was born, my father had abused my mother so badly that she was very ill and unable to care for me. Even though my sisters were from three to eleven years older than I was, I was sent to the orphanage. None of these things spoke well of me as far as the family was concerned. I not only had to endure my father’s abuse (he started beating me when I was still in the crib, apparently because some of the manners I had learned at the orphanage were not to his liking), but I had to endure my siblings’ abuse as well, because I had made my mother ill by the mere fact of being born. Lucky for me, they decided to take me home from the orphanage after a year!
We lived in a five-story tenement, and I was the errand child for every member of my family. I went up and down the five flights for milk, bread, magazines, cosmetics, the newspaper, the cigarettes, the “you name it.” If they would sell it to a child, I had to run for it. Many times every day, I went running up and down five flights of steps. There’s a great deal more to that story, but for the purpose of this testimony, suffice to say I had a broken heart to bring to the Lord. I had been raised by a father who called his children every evil name that one could possibly think of, regardless of age or condition. He called us all whores, scum, evil, stupid, of no account, whatever came to his mind. Whatever evil thing he could think of at the time came out of his mouth. He threatened us all the time. It was a horrible way to grow up.
Then when I was about seven years old, I was sexually abused by my brother-in-law. You know I didn’t tell anyone about that. It’s a strange thing to live in an environment where the only example you have is of cheating, lying, deceitfulness, abuse, alcoholism, adultery, and on and on, but everyone tells you to be good! How can you be good when you have a completely evil example all around you? It isn’t possible. But while I was trying to be good I was being bad! Very bad! While I didn’t know what the answer was, I wanted to know God, I wanted to please God. But I was spiraling out of control. I hated myself and I hated everything around me. I just didn’t know how to put a stop to it.
I tried many times to commit suicide. I had lost all hope. I had no desire to live, but after I’d had two sons of my own, I couldn’t find an easy way out.
I was one of the hundreds of thousands who tuned in to the Billy Graham televised crusades in 1975 and 1976 to learn about the love of God. I can remember that I’d watch sometimes with my husband and two boys. If there was anyone present with me, then I would not respond to the call. Finally, one day I was alone for a moment, and I quickly got on my knees to repeat the salvation prayer with Billy. I didn’t understand spiritual things, so I thought nothing happened. However, I know now that it did; I was just not fully aware of those things at the time.
In 1976, a Billy Graham movie came to our area. I went to the movie with my family. I had great expectations by this time. After the movie was shown, the audience was addressed, probably by ministers of the local church. I had never heard an altar call before in my life. I didn’t really know that’s what Billy was doing in the crusades. I asked everyone in my family to go forward with me; I was ashamed to go by myself. My husband and my sons refused to go. My husband said, “If you feel you should go, go! You don’t need us to go with you.”
Well, that gave me the last push I needed. I went forward. The speaker asked us to face the stage curtain. My heart was pounding so terribly hard, and the blood had rushed to my head. It was so intense for me that I could not hear the speaker. The speaker asked the audience to leave the theater and wait outside for anyone who had responded to the altar call. Well, crazy thing … when I saw everyone leaving, I left too. I felt so silly. I thought, Why did they ask us to go up to the stage if no one was going to talk to us?
I did not realize that they didn’t want the respondents to leave, just the remaining audience. When I got outside and found my family, my husband said, “What are you doing out here? You’re supposed to be in there. The minister was going to speak to all of you.”
Oh my! I thought to myself all the way home. That was it! I lost my only opportunity to come to God. I’m going to hell!
I did not understand the grace of God or the mercy of God. Thanks be to God that He had a hold of me and never let me go. Thank God, I’ve been walking with our great and wonderful God ever since.
As a result of my coming to Christ, my whole family and many friends and acquaintances in my community turned to the Lord!
Thank you, Billy, for your commitment, for your suffering, for your giving, for your family, for your tears, for your endurance, for your prayers, for all your family, for your energy, for your love of God, for your ministry, for your dear wife, now with the Lord, for all that you are and have ever been in the hands of God!
FIRST STEP ON THE JOURNEY
Dear Billy, when I was four, maybe five, years old, I went to see a movie. I don’t remember what it was or why the Gospel was presented at the movie theater, but I made a decision right after. I wanted to say tha
t I believed in Jesus, and I wanted Him to come into my heart. Afterward, I remember receiving little comic books in the mail that helped me know more about Jesus. Now, thirty years later, I want to say thank you for introducing me to the Lord. I belong to Him, and I can’t imagine my life without faith. Thank you for lifting up Jesus, the one who draws all people to Himself.
THANKS FOR THE MOVIES!
I knew about the crusades but never could sit through one. I went to see a movie with friends during my freshman year of college in 1973. I believe it was called Run for Your Life. I was yielding my heart to God but didn’t understand enough to go forward. I wanted to stay and talk to people. My friends didn’t. I still didn’t “get” the Gospel, but my name was on a list, and three years later, I received tickets to The Hiding Place. I cried through most of the movie and went home asking every Christian I knew if they had faith like Betsie ten Boom. Still, I didn’t understand. My intellect was in the way. Finally, in a discussion with a Christian counselor, he called Jesus his Master. Everything fell into place for me, and I gave myself, body and soul, to Jesus. Later, the movie Joni had a profound impact on my life. I’m happy to say that now I love to listen to sermons and read books, but it was your movies that were the bridge that reached me where I was. Thank you so very much!
THE GOD-SHAPED VOID
Billy Graham, borrowing from St. Augustine, frequently refers to a “God-shaped void” in the human heart. For as long as I could remember, I had experienced this void in two forms. One was an intense need to be sure. The grandson of Southern Baptist missionaries to Cuba, I’d grown up in a good home with a Christian atmosphere, but one where God was only occasionally acknowledged. From an early age, I was fully aware that the Lord desired a personal relationship. My problem was the question of truth. As I look back now from the perspective of an adult, I think I can say that, as early as age eleven, I was desperately anxious to be sure that whatever I ended up committing my life to reflected the central truth of reality, not some fragment I’d have to discard and then start over.
My other experience of the God-shaped void was what C. S. Lewis describes as “a homesickness for a place we’ve never been.” He calls this “joy,” although it’s more like grief, because it’s a yearning for something we lack. For me, this grief was so intense, it was positively painful. A paradoxical feature of joy is that its only satisfaction in this life is to feel it yet more intensely. I compare it to a photo of his family that a soldier takes with him on a tour of duty. The picture lacks the substance of his family and awakens homesickness, but it’s a kind of pain he wants to feel. This seems to be the function of the God-shaped void in my life. By virtue of its resemblance to the thing missing in my life, it suggested the direction to go to fill that void.
As it was for Lewis, the quest to fill this emptiness became the central theme of my life. Outside of school, I chose every book to read based on how it reawakened this longing. For me, it was evoked most strongly by myth, fantasy, and science fiction. Ironically, I never met anyone else who ever expressed this longing, and for many years I suspected I might be the only one who felt this way. I was an adult before I realized that this is a universal longing.
My family was part of a good Southern Baptist church, and I heard an evangelistic sermon every Sunday morning and evening. By the age of eleven, I was under strong conviction. However, my decision to come to Christ was delayed for several years after I was offended by an attempt by my pastor to coerce uncommitted children of my age group to “join the church.” I finally responded to a call for salvation at age thirteen. Within hours of my decision, I found that the joy of yearning had been replaced by what Paul calls “the joy of the Lord,” a sense of inner containment, contentment, and a sense of being in the presence of a person. As I’ve said, I had known the basic facts of scripture since early childhood, but now these truths took on the weight of reality. My God-shaped void had been filled. Joy in Lewis’s sense is still important to me, but now it serves as an interior evidence of God’s existence.
You’d think that after all this, I could now relax and settle into a contented routine of building a Christian life. But I soon ran into obstacles. At this point, the ministries of Billy Graham played a crucial role. Within about six months of my conversion, I’d begun to ask questions about issues that were never explicitly addressed in the life of my church. The pulpit ministry was so dedicated to evangelism that every sermon, including Christmas and Easter, was focused on winning the one or two unconverted visitors who might have sneaked in the back, rather than discipling the hundreds of committed believers who sat in the pews. I also was at fault, because I failed to begin studying the Bible; I’d known most of the stories since birth, but I had never read the Old Testament or the epistles as complete books. Although I had become active in the various youth ministries of the church, by about a year after my conversion the glow of my experience was fading, and I was losing the sense of the Lord’s presence. I began to be lukewarm in my devotion.
At this key juncture, I was saved in my downhill slide through an invitation to go see the Billy Graham movie The Restless Ones. This film met several of my needs at once. It gave me a glimpse of what a Christian life is supposed to be like—not a resting on the embalmed memory of a conversion experience in the past, but an ongoing story of growth from one degree of glory to the next. Ralph Carmichael’s film score also introduced me to my ongoing hobby of what we now know as contemporary Christian music. This led me to learn the guitar, which over the last forty years has opened the door for more ministry opportunities than I can remember.
The film also forced me to realize that I needed to learn the Bible systematically in order to grow. Eventually, this interest led me to a seminary degree in Christian education and a PhD in humanities, focusing on the spread of Christianity through cultural expressions.
During my teenage years, I sorely needed an example of a mature Christian man of humility, integrity, and stature. I read and reread John Pollack’s authorized biography of Mr. Graham many times. Mr. Graham’s popular apologetic books were also very important to my growth during those years.
One blessing I’ve prayed for many times is a chance to express my gratitude to Mr. Graham in person. Although it seems unlikely that I’ll get a chance to do so face-to-face this side of heaven, I am grateful for this opportunity to tell my story and say, “Thank you, Billy Graham, for your faithfulness and your role in so many important influences on my life.”
Robert
FOR PETE’S SAKE
I was born and raised in Gadsden, Alabama, and I can rarely remember a Sunday morning or Sunday night that our family wasn’t worshipping at our local, downtown church. My older siblings were very involved in church youth activities, and I followed in their footsteps. Choir, Boy Scouts, church basketball, vacation Bible school, and weekend retreats throughout the year … you name it, and I did it. I had great training in discipleship classes and Sunday school. I was happy growing up. I had great friends. I stayed out of trouble. I lived a “good life.”
But it was in a movie theater, of all places, that I exchanged this “good life” growing up in Gadsden for a greater life in Jesus Christ. On a Sunday afternoon in December 1968, at the Pitman Theatre in downtown Gadsden, our church youth group went to see a movie called For Pete’s Sake, produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. I was thirteen years old at the time.
I guess sometimes you have to go “outside” church walls to fully appreciate what you’ve been exposed to “inside” the church. In a way that only God could have orchestrated, after watching For Pete’s Sake I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Although I was exposed to biblical teachings from birth, for some reason I had never actually made a public decision for Christ.
So, even though I never attended a Billy Graham crusade in person, through the magic of movies I was able to hear, and respond to, a Billy Graham invitation. As a physical and eternal reminder of that day, I still possess my tic
ket from that movie. On that day, on the back of the ticket, I wrote, “On Sunday, December 8, 1968, by seeing this movie, I accepted Christ into my heart.”
In 2002, I was asked to share my testimony at my church, which of course included my For Pete’s Sake story. A few weeks later, a package came in the mail. Much to my surprise, one of my church friends had found a VHS copy of For Pete’s Sake at a store closeout sale and thought I would want it. That night, while watching For Pete’s Sake again, I was taken back to that day some thirty-five years earlier when I saw the movie for the first time, and because of Billy Graham’s invitation, accepted Christ into my heart. Despite the fact that I had grown up in the church, God used Billy Graham and World Wide Pictures to save a lost soul. Thank you, Billy!
SAVED IN A MOVIE THEATER
When I was seventeen, I was going through a very traumatic time in my life. My parents took me to see the movie The Restless Ones, and I sat glued to my seat! Once the movie concluded, the Rev. Billy Graham presented the Lord to us and led us all through the sinner’s prayer. I instantly felt a humongous load being lifted from my heart and an inexplicable and overwhelming peace come over me. I was also filled with an immense joy that made me just shout to everyone (literally) that I felt so great! I kept telling my parents that I couldn’t believe how good and happy I felt. I hadn’t felt that good since the day I was born, although I was raised in a Christian home.
I haven’t looked back since, and I now serve the Lord as minister of music for my church, as a youth counselor—and what I love to do the most, as armor bearer for my daughter, who is the youth pastor for our church. I love Jesus dearly and have always wanted the opportunity to let Billy know how much I love him for leading me to my Lord and Savior. I still watch his old campaigns—I love them all and still get ministered to by them. Thank you so very much for this precious opportunity to express my gratitude to God’s servant, and a man whom I love very much. May God continue blessing him and all of you as you continue doing God’s work. I wish I could speak to Billy myself, but I know he’s feeling a little weak and cannot do so now. But I will talk to him when I see him in heaven, and then I can hug him and thank him in person—though I know there will be a long line of other saints feeling the same way!
Thank You, Billy Graham Page 9