My Christian journey took many twists and turns through young adulthood. But it was the personal relationship with God, a foundation laid down that day at a stadium in Stockholm, that planted a critical experience in my heart. Ironically, it was a seed that later bloomed in Billy Graham’s backyard, in upstate South Carolina. Decades later, and just miles away from Billy’s home in the mountains of North Carolina, the girl who had walked forward in Stockholm was making a home as a local news anchor in Spartanburg. Through a Bible study for new moms, I was able to reconnect with that heartfelt desire to have a personal relationship with God.
We all know it’s a small world, and making it even smaller was this: I wound up growing the seed that Rev. Graham helped to plant across the ocean, at First Baptist Church, the very church where Rev. Graham himself turned in his later years of life—the two of us sharing the same pastor and a loving God.
YOU WERE THE ONE WHO PLANTED THE SEED IN MY HEART
I wasn’t even a Christian, but I occasionally watched your crusades on TV. I did not grow up in a Christian home. We went to church, but I never thought that much about God. Through school and halfway through my military service, my life was fine. Then my world fell apart. I felt like no one cared. I said if God didn’t care, neither did I. I did things I never imagined I would do, ate like a pig to cover the guilt, and had a nervous breakdown. Still, I never sought help.
Some time later, I was assigned to another base. God put me right across the hall from two Christian girls about my age. I had been there about three or four months when I accepted Jesus as my Savior. Looking back over the years (thirty-five to be exact), I know that you were the one who planted the seed in my heart so that one day it would take root and grow into a “tree” for what the Lord had planned for me. Since I have been walking with Him, I have had highs and lows, but He has never left me nor forsaken me. He is always true to His promises. Mr. Graham, I have watched your crusades every chance I got. God has used you to touch my life in so many ways; I couldn’t begin to tell you. The Bible says one plants and another waters, but God gives the increase. The Lord put a call on your life, and you were obedient. Thanks for being there to plant the seed. God bless you.
THE WALL IN MY HEART
I heard Billy Graham preach in Berlin, in 1990. One year after the Berlin Wall had come down, his words about grace changed my life. The wall in my heart came down, and I met Jesus for the first time. Back then, I was a very young man with many burdens, having grown up in East Germany without a father. Today, I am a happy father, husband, film and TV writer, director, preacher, and consultant to young people. The glory goes to God. Thank you, Billy Graham, for sowing the first seed in my heart, and thank you to all of those who have supported this ministry over the years.
A LIFE-CHANGING DAY … THANK GOD!
I’m a fifty-five-year-old mother of six children. I thank God for Billy Graham and for what his ministry did in my life. I had a lot of trials in my life as a child. I talked to God a lot about the things I went through, and I attended church regularly. By twelve years of age, I had tried to commit suicide, but God didn’t let me die. One day, I was watching TV and the Billy Graham program was on. I started watching it, really listening to the message. I understood what he was saying; it was so real to me that day. At the end, when he asked people to come to the front if they wanted Christ in their life, I began to cry. I cried hard, and God ministered to my young heart. I prayed and asked Christ into my life.
I went on serving God in church, singing in the choir, teaching Sunday school, etc. But then when I turned eighteen, I just didn’t go to church anymore and lived my life. I went through more hard times—a very brutal first marriage, a difficult second one, sick children, and sick myself most of my life, another attempted suicide. My husband and I were going through some financial trials, and neither of us went to church anymore. God was calling us and we ignored Him, so He turned up the pressure. We finally had enough, and one day that week someone put a flier in our fence about heaven or hell. We called the number on the flier, and a pastor came to visit us and told us about Jesus and invited us to his church. We went as a family, and my husband and I rededicated our lives back to the Lord. We then went into ministry, and my husband became a minister.
You see, a seed was planted in my life all those years ago through the Billy Graham ministry. Was it the big crusade, the great preaching, the singing? It was the power of God and the anointing on a very obedient humble man of God. I want to thank his wife and his children for sharing him with the world. We needed the message he was born to preach.
There once was a man named Billy Graham
He preached about God all over the land
And now that he is old and gray
The seeds he planted will never fade away
They continue to spread all over the earth
Many a life experienced new birth
The goal you see is to get them heaven-bound
Not to that place under the ground
Billy Graham’s ministry did this for me
Now my spirit is finally free
All praise goes to God our Father for using a humble servant, Billy Graham.
YOU PLANTED THE SEEDS
Dear Brother Graham: Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. I was first introduced to your ministry many years ago as a young boy. My dad would always invite me to watch your crusades with him on TV. I was always impressed by the mighty healings that the Lord would do through you. Dad wasn’t much of a churchgoer in those days, yet he had an uncanny type of faith. You see, Dad was a heavy smoker and just couldn’t seem to find a church that would allow him to smoke in the pew.
I will never forget that one day when a neighbor stopped by and mocked you, saying to Dad, “You really don’t believe all that hocus-pocus, do you?” Dad replied, “Yes, I do. I believe that Jesus has apostles today, just like He did when He walked the earth, and Billy Graham is one!”
Those messages planted a seed of faith, which bore fruit many years later. You see, in 1980, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). But in 1984, I gave my heart to the Lord and was totally healed through the prayers of a local ministry. That move of the Lord led Dad and other family members to give their hearts to the Lord, too. Dad went home to be with the Lord on July 11, 2007. Today, both my wife, Patti, and I are deacons in our local church. Again, thank you!
AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS
When I was a teenager, around the year 1971, my parents were watching a Billy Graham crusade on TV. As I walked through the room to go upstairs to my bedroom, my father said, “Patti, you really should watch this. “My mother chimed in, “Yes, Patti, get down here and watch this.” We were a Catholic family. My father loved to watch Billy Graham. My mother really wasn’t that interested but watched because my dad did.
I said, “No, I’m going to bed.” I had never heard him preach before and didn’t want to watch him simply because my parents said I “needed” to. As I reached the top stair, I paused when I heard Brother Graham say something like this (not a direct quote): “If Jesus Christ isn’t your main thought during the day, then He is not your God.” I was shocked. I knew I didn’t think of Jesus Christ every day, but I thought I believed well enough.
I don’t know if my parents remembered anything Billy Graham said. But I’ve remembered those words all my life. I became a born-again Christian a few years later, when I was twenty, through friends who had gotten saved. But I know the very first seed planted in me was planted by Brother Graham that night as I barely listened at the top of the stairs. Thank you so much for your ministry!
BILLY SOWED THE SEED
As a Ugandan University student in London in 1984, I had the fortune to hear Billy Graham preach the Gospel one evening at a little chapel in Victoria, just around the corner from Buckingham Palace.
Billy Graham spoke in a low voice that day, because he had either just had an operation or was not well. As I got up to answer the altar c
all at the end of the message, I was somehow dissuaded by someone I’d gone with, and sat back down again. Nonetheless, the seed had been sown in me.
It was to be another fourteen years of twists and turns in my life before I finally answered that call, back in Uganda in 1998. On the day I finally answered the call, I remembered the evening I’d heard the Gospel from Billy Graham. He had sown the seed, and someone else had watered it. Praise God!
NOT TOO DIRTY TO BE CLEAN
I was brought up in the church. My mother was a very prayerful woman, who was a powerful influence and witness in the lives of her five children, who all have now become ministers and pastors of the Gospel. Although I was brought up in the church, I somehow never felt accepted, nor could I ever seem to follow all the rules and regulations that would make me a “saint” according to my church’s teaching. So, after giving birth to a child at age sixteen and later marrying the father, I went on to have three more children in this abusive marriage. I later began to use drugs and drink and sell my body to support my children while attempting to get through college after my divorce.
It was during this time that some women from my mother’s church came to witness to me about giving my life to the Lord, but I simply expressed to them that I was not ready. The teaching at that time was that you “get ready,” stop sinning, and then come to the Lord. I had no power to clean myself up. A few days later, I was sitting in front of the television and there was Billy Graham preaching in one of his crusades. He was saying that you can “just come” to the Lord and that being a sinner qualifies you for an opportunity to be forgiven, if you would repent and ask Jesus to save you. I listened and doubted that it could be that simple. I prayed, and felt the tears roll down my face as the Lord embraced me with his love. I still remember the warmth that came into my heart. But I dared not tell others, who had told me I was “too dirty to be clean,” that I had been forgiven and accepted by Jesus. In listening to the teachings of my upbringing, I began to doubt that I had been saved and began to return to the ways of the world, but a seed had been planted, and about a year later, I gave my life totally to the Lord and allowed Him to clean up my life from drinking and the life I was living.
About five years later, I accepted a call into ministry, and cofounded a church in Hawaii. And because Billy Graham was one of my mentors in ministry, I thought I would conduct my altar call as he had. I began reading a book called The Effective Invitation and saw how people would come to the altar for salvation and prayer. Since then, I have been through many trials and now have relocated to Arkansas. My husband and I pastor a church here, and I always open the service with a reading from the devotional Hope for Each Day: Words of Wisdom and Faith, by Dr. Graham. I continue to hold Dr. Graham as my mentor. He and Ruth will truly have a soul-winner’s crown worth its weight in glory.
THE CALL TO EVANGELISM
Dear Billy, thank you first of all for being faithful to the call of God on your life. As you preached to the crowds at a crusade, I too got saved in my living room in front of my TV set. I don’t remember my age then, but I was a very young girl. The compelling Word of God you spoke into my life planted the seed of new life. I didn’t realize then the course that my life would follow. All I knew was I received a hunger for God. My spirit yearns to fulfill my destiny in God. I trust and know God is not done with me yet. When you shared Jesus, I believe you planted words that God had ordained for me. I pray I will be as faithful as you have been until Jesus returns.
PRECIOUS SEEDS OF BLESSING
The Rev. Billy Graham has been a household name in my home for as long as I can recall. I grew up on a farm in South Georgia, and we worked hard. It didn’t matter what we were doing, if Rev. Graham was going to be on television, my family was in the living room watching the one old black-and-white TV set. We only got three channels, but praise God, Billy Graham was on one of them! No one talked or moved around during the message.
My father was a strict disciplinarian, a WWII veteran, and was not even saved for part of the years we watched the Billy Graham crusades. I know that Rev. Graham planted and watered many spiritual seeds in our home, and in my life. My father’s salvation when he was in his forties is one of the precious seeds of blessing…. I was not saved directly as a result of a TV crusade, but the seeds were definitely there. I finally was able to attend a crusade in the mid- to late 1990s in Atlanta.
THE FRUIT IS OBVIOUS
When I was a little girl growing up in Arkansas, in a family of six children, my mother used to watch the Billy Graham crusades. She was the first in her family of seven children to come to Christ. I remember her family making fun of her, and my dad would often abuse her. I never once heard my mother answer back with an unkind word. She faithfully took all six of us kids to church and lived a quiet strength devoted to Christ.
Because of her faithfulness, I wanted to learn the Word of God for myself, and even as a young child, I would try to read the Bible. Even as a young child, I could sense the presence of God whenever the Billy Graham crusades were on. It was obvious God was drawing me and had a great plan for my life.
I thank God for my mother, and I thank God that I had the experience of hearing the Gospel through Billy Graham as a young child. It would be the seeds that God would later water on in my life. Even now, I watch the reruns on TBN on Saturday nights … and the presence of God is just as strong now as it was then. It gives me a wonderful, comforting feeling.
I went on to have three sons, and my youngest joined the Marine Corps. In February 2004, I was driving my son’s Jeep back from Cherry Point, North Carolina, to Tulsa after he had just left for his first tour of duty to Iraq. Having been on the road for several hours, I needed to stretch my legs and get some gas, so I took the next turn to the right. I noticed it was a beautiful little town, and as I stepped out of the car, I felt a presence.
After getting gas, I thought I would stop in one of the shops, and I noticed there were quite a few Billy Graham books—and one by Ruth that I had been looking for. When I commented to the clerk that I was so glad to find that book, she said, “Well, Billy and Ruth live right up the road.” Then I understood what the presence was … you could literally feel God’s presence so strong there, in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
I realized, too, that the presence I felt was the power of prayer—the many prayers that had gone off that mountain, prayed not only by the Grahams but many faithful people of God. I realize that is probably as close as I will ever get to being around Billy or the Graham family, but, oh my, what a pleasant surprise it was that day. How beautiful is that little town snuggled by those mountains. Oh my, what a sweet presence of Jesus I could feel.
Thank you, Billy Graham. The fruit is obvious … oh so obvious!
Thank You, Billy Graham … for Helping Me Find Jesus
BLOCKED IN MY CLOSET
When I was two years old, my parents divorced. Back then (1962), the father never got custody, but my dad did. But, being in the service, he could not take care of three children all under the age of five, so he put us in a Catholic orphanage in Texas, near the border with Mexico. Six months later (after begging the nuns not to allow us to be adopted), he came to get us with a new wife.
I grew up knowing hardly anything about God. My parents took me to catechism before I was seven, but with my father being in the service for twenty years, all that moving around made it hard to make friends.
By the time I was ten, my father retired from the navy and bought a 240-acre farm in northern Wisconsin. By the time I was thirteen, I was the product of a double divorce, with my stepmother gaining custody. I spent the next few years experiencing everything the world had to offer, using alcohol and men to try to fulfill my needs. I was very sad and lonely, and my life was going nowhere as I went to ladies’ nights, nickel night, dance contests, and anything that was offered at any bar to try to forget my loneliness.
One day, I was at my one-bedroom apartment and decided to clean out my one huge closet. I pulled
everything out and pushed it into the middle of the room, hoping to rearrange and fix everything from there. Instead, I found I had blocked myself into the closet.
I had the TV on in the other room, pretty loud so I could hear it in the closet. Then to my surprise I began hearing someone talk about God and Jesus, I didn’t even know the difference between God and Jesus. Well, I did not want to hear anything from some “Jesus freak,” but I was blocked into my closet and couldn’t get out. I didn’t want to make a bigger mess trying to get out, so I started arranging things much faster so I could march over to the TV as soon as possible to turn the channel.
Finally! I cleared enough room to make it over to the TV, but when I put my hand on the knob to turn it, I couldn’t…. My hand stopped, and I stood there listening to what the man was saying. He was at the point where you call the number on the bottom of the screen. I said to myself, I will call, but if I get put on hold or a busy signal, I will just hang up.
I dialed the number, and when a man answered, I began to tell him how I tried to be a good person and that my mother had sent me a Bible and that I had it right next to my bed. (I didn’t tell him that I had never even opened the Bible.) He very matter-of-factly said, “Then why did you call?” My response did not check in with my head; it came right out of my spirit. I said, “I want to accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” Instantly, from head to toe, I felt a tingling sensation. I was changed instantly, never to be the same again! And to this day, twenty-four years later, I am still living for, loving, and serving God with all my heart, soul, and might.
Thank You, Billy Graham Page 18