Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham

by Billy Graham

  My achievements were not all glorious, however. One day I was serving the head table. The Christian Church denomination, having rented all the facilities at the Institute for a time, was in the process of holding its summer conference. As I was about to pour steaming hot coffee into a cup, a man in a white suit raised his arm to make a point. When that arm hit the coffee pot, he screamed! He knocked it right out of my hand and into the lap of the lady in a white dress sitting next to him—and she screamed! I snatched a napkin and desperately tried to dry both people off.

  “Get away!” he yelled. “Get away!”

  I preferred the outdoor chores anyway—tasks like hedgetrimming and lawn maintenance. A real bonus job for many of us fellows was caddying on the golf course. Legendary preachers whom I had only heard about materialized right on the fairways and greens of our campus, and I could walk beside them as they made their rounds on the course, carrying their golf bags and spotting where their balls landed.

  Preachers got reduced rates in exchange for speaking in our chapel and classes or at Dr. Watson’s independent church in St. Petersburg, the Gospel Tabernacle. That church had started in a ragged tent in the early twenties, but it now occupied a building seating 4,000 people. Many of those visiting preachers made a lasting impression on me in their own individual ways.

  World-renowned evangelist Gipsy Smith, probably in his seventies by then, came and stayed for weeks at a time. I asked him for his autograph, but he turned me down. I felt hurt by the rebuff. Later, when we became good friends, I did get his autograph, and I promised myself that if anyone was ever kind enough to ask me for my autograph, I would gladly give it if I possibly could.

  William Evans, former director of the Bible department at Moody Bible Institute, particularly impressed my schoolmate Roy Gustafson, who would years later become a member of our evangelistic Team. Roy copied many things Evans said and did—his hand movements, his tone of voice. One day in class, or so the story goes, Roy’s roommate, Charles Massey, fell asleep beside Roy while Evans was lecturing.

  “Wake that boy up there!” shouted Evans.

  “Dr. Evans,” responded Roy, “you put him to sleep; you wake him up.”

  For carrying his golf clubs around the course, Dr. Evans tipped me $1 and told me to apply myself to my studies so that someday I would be in a position to give a tip too.

  E. A. Marshall spent every winter there, fascinating all of us with his maps and flannelgraphs of the Holy Land that explained where everything in the Bible had happened.

  W. B. Riley and his wife from First Baptist Church in Minneapolis came down every year too; he was also founder and president of Northwestern Schools. His wife took time to help us students put together our yearbook, since she supervised the excellent one put out at Northwestern Schools. My previous Fuller Brush salesmanship won me a place on the yearbook staff, drumming up advertising from local businesses.

  Another speaker was the highly intellectual A. B. Winchester from Canada. He had a memorable phrase he repeated frequently throughout his lectures and sermons: “My Bible says. . . .”

  This visiting faculty also included such men as W. R. Newell, E. R. Neighbor, Theodore Elsner, A. C. Gaebelein, Donald G. Barnhouse, Oswald J. Smith, E. J. Pace, Homer Rodeheaver, and Harry Rimmer. They were not names in the headlines, but in conservative Christian circles they were the Who’s Who of evangelicals; they exerted a lot of good influence. And they were colorful personalities with a highly individual flair in their public speaking.

  It was wonderful to be in the company of these men and women, and with such others as the general superintendents of the Christian and Missionary Alliance, Methodist preachers, and a whole host of people from other denominations. That exposure broadened my view of the Church.

  Wendell, my former roommate, and Woodrow Flynn, my pres-ent roommate (who had also attended Bob Jones College for a time), quickly introduced me all around to my new classmates, and I soon had a sense of belonging to a wonderful new family. I knew I was where I ought to be. This was confirmed in an early letter home: “Mother, words can’t express Florida Bible Institute. . . . I love it here. I’m working a little every day so as to help a little on my way. I’m stronger and feel so much better.”

  The curriculum was largely Bible courses, or subjects related to the Bible (for example, church history). It also offered me the saturation I wanted in the study of God’s Word. I came to believe with all my heart in the full inspiration of the Bible.

  One thing that thrilled me was the diversity of viewpoints we were exposed to in the classroom, a wondrous blend of ecumenical and evangelical thought that was really ahead of its time. Our teachers came from different backgrounds and denominations, exhibiting to us what harmony could be present where Christ and His Word were loved and served. In their teaching, they were not afraid to let us know about other philosophies and even about views critical of Christianity. Dr. Watson had actually dropped the word Fundamentalist from the name of the school after its first two years because it had come to connote such a negative image in the public mind.

  We were encouraged to think things through for ourselves, but always with the unique authority of Scripture as our guide. So many of the questions that I had to keep bottled up previously could now be freely aired and wisely answered. I could stretch my mind without feeling that I was doing violence to my soul.

  The faculty’s openness, and the diversity of visiting lecturers, instilled in me a fresh enthusiasm for the Lord and a burst of energy to get involved in His work. I still had no clear plan of action for my life, however. I was as carefree and happy-go-lucky as ever—maybe more so—in this subtropical playground of the Lord’s.

  The Institute was committed to equipping all of us for Chris-tian witness in the world, even if not as preachers. So students were sent out regularly, both as individuals and in teams, to churches, missions, trailer parks, jails, street corners, and just about any other place that would have them. What we lacked in finesse we made up in youthful exuberance. In the course of student assignments that came my way, I spoke almost regularly at the well-populated trailer parks in the winter months and at The Stockade, Tampa’s jail.

  The dean of men was the Reverend John Minder, a red-haired giant. His mother, who was from Switzerland, lived with him and inspired me a great deal. The fact that Minder was a bachelor freed him to give a lot of time to each student, as well as to his pastoral duties at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle (CMA), which he had founded—as Dr. Watson had his St. Petersburg church—while in his early twenties. He saw me for what I was—a spindly farmboy with lots of nail-biting energy, a mediocre academic record, and a zeal to serve the Lord that exceeded my knowledge and skills.

  I enthusiastically took his courses in pastoral theology and hermeneutics (or Bible interpretation), and I responded instinctively and positively to his gentle counseling approach, so different from the authoritarian ways I had just experienced in Tennessee. Instead of resenting his advice, I wanted to hear everything he could tell me about life and service. He did not dictate how to think and what to do; rather, he opened my thinking to consider the perfect trustworthiness of God, and to rest in that.

  One day not long after I arrived, Dr. Watson called a meeting of the whole school to tell us there was a financial crisis and that he had nowhere to turn for funds. Under his leadership, we spent almost the entire day in prayer. At the end of the day, Dr. Watson stepped back into the prayer meeting to make a special announcement. He had just received a telegram from a man in the North named Kellogg, who said he had been strangely burdened that day to send a check to the school. That check was for $10,000! We were convinced our prayers had been answered, as the Scriptures promised, even above what we had dared to expect.

  In early spring of 1937, at Easter, Dr. Minder invited me to accompany him on the 150-mile ride to his summer conference grounds at Lake Swan in northern Florida, a 150-acre property owned by his family. While there on a cold, blustery Saturday, we got t
ogether in nearby Palatka with his friend Cecil Underwood, a lay preacher who was pastoring Peniel Baptist Church five miles to the west.

  Out of the blue, Mr. Underwood asked Dean Minder if he would mind preaching for him the following evening at a small Baptist church in Bostwick, for which Mr. Underwood had taken responsibility.

  “No,” he answered, “Billy is going to preach.”

  I was stunned. My repertoire at the time consisted of about four borrowed sermons, which I had adapted and practiced but never preached. This would be different from the old Fellowship Club meetings in Charlotte. There I just got up and “let them have it.” But in a strange church—a Baptist one at that—what would I do?

  When I told Mr. Underwood that I had never preached a formal sermon in front of a church audience, he and Dean Minder both laughed.

  “We’ll pray for you,” said Mr. Underwood, “and God will help you.”

  “All right,” I agreed rather hesitantly.

  What else could I say to the dean of my school? But I was so frightened that I spent the night studying and praying instead of sleeping. I did the same most of the next day, practicing aloud. By evening I felt confident that any one of my sermons should be good for at least twenty or thirty minutes.

  The meeting room was small, with a potbellied iron stove near the front to take the chill off that cold, windy night. The song leader, who chewed tobacco, had to go to the door every so often to spit outside; he could have used the stove just as conveniently. The congregation of about 40 included ranchers and cowboys in overalls and their women in cotton wash dresses.

  When the moment came to walk to the pulpit in the tiny Bostwick Baptist Church, my knees shook and perspiration glistened on my hands. I launched into sermon number one. It seemed to be over almost as soon as I got started, so I added number two. And number three. And eventually number four. Then I sat down.

  Eight minutes—that was all it took to preach all four of my sermons! Was this the stuff of which those marvelous preachers at Florida Bible Institute were made?

  Believe it or not, though, when I got back to campus I felt that I had grown spiritually through the experience. But at the same time I was concerned: I could not get away from a nagging feeling in my heart that I was being called by God to preach the Gospel. I did not welcome that call. Whatever glimmer of talent Dr. Minder might have thought he saw in me was certainly Raw, with a capital R.

  I practiced for when the time would again come to preach in public. My roommate, Woodrow Flynn, was a great sermonizer and would preach his outlines to me in our cold room in front of the little stove. I used outlines of sermons borrowed from great published preachers like Dr. Lee Scarborough of Texas. I would paddle a canoe across the Hillsborough to a little island where I could address all creatures great and small, from alligators to birds. If they would not stop to listen, there was always a congregation of cypress stumps that could neither slither nor fly away. The loudness of my preaching was in direct proportion to their unresponsiveness, so the trees got my voice at full blast.

  Once some fishermen, wandering within earshot, paused in amazement at this bellowing beanpole of a boy who seemed to rise from the river. Too often a few of my fellow students would line the opposite bank at my return to cheer me on with comments like, “How many converts did you get today, Billy?”

  One day Dr. Watson was walking down a corridor of the men’s residence building when he overheard a similar practice session. Drawn toward the open door of my room, he looked in to see me shouting a sermon at his four-year-old son, Bobby, whom I had perched on top of the high antique dresser, perhaps to prevent his escape.

  Things were bound to get better, though. Woodrow recalled one of my earliest speaking experiences in a rural Methodist church where I was teamed with him as organist and Wendell as song leader.

  In full swing, physically and vocally, I was telling my audience about the ancient world’s wait for Christ, as the great Dwight L. Moody had presented it in a sermon.

  “A thousand years went by, and no Christ!”

  Dramatic pause.

  “Two thousand years rolled by, and no Christ!”

  Dramatic pause.

  It was during just such a dramatic pause, after I had gotten to “seven thousand years,” that Wendell, from his seat on the platform behind me, hissed, “Shut up!”

  Indignant, I asked him on the way home, “What did you mean saying, ‘Shut up,’ when I was preaching?”

  “Well,” he said, “according to Archbishop Ussher’s chronology of Genesis, there have been but six thousand years since Adam was created.”

  “I was going to at least ten thousand years,” I replied, “because that was good preaching!”

  Despite my awkward debut in Bostwick at Easter, Dr. Minder invited me to speak to his Sunday night youth group at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle. Then came the moment when he asked me to preach at a regular service. I was downright frightened. Woodrow was lying on his bunk in our room when I told him about it. “And I haven’t even got a sermon!” I concluded in despair.

  He sat up and, then and there, commenced to preach me one of his own on Belshazzar, the ancient pagan monarch in Daniel 5. I liked it and told him I would use it. But I was not counting on having to repeat to the congregation the handwriting on the wall that made the king turn pale in verse 25: “Mene, Mene, tekel, upharsin” was not the kind of phraseology that came easily to a Carolina farmboy. “Meany, meany, tickle, upjohn” was the way it came out of my mouth. It sure tickled my buddies, but I didn’t think it was all that funny.

  When I returned to the Institute after summer vacation that first year, I little guessed that I would face my severest test before the school year was over, when a beautiful girl complicated my life. Emily Cavanaugh—I had been smitten with love at the first sight of her soon after arriving at Florida Bible Institute, spending as much time with her as I could that first year. And I was not the only fellow on campus so afflicted. Wendell had been the first to alert me to the jewel that was Emily. It was something about her dark hair and sparkling eyes.

  A chance to be near Emily happened every Sunday night. The several of us who went to Dr. Minder’s youth group at the Tampa Gospel Tabernacle converged on the Cavanaughs’ nearby house for supper before the meeting. I got in the habit of suggesting that we go back there afterward for our dessert, my favorite being Jell-O with fruit in it.

  Sometimes Emily and others would go along on my preaching assignments or to young people’s events, riding in the used 1929 Chevrolet coupe I had picked up for $75 (or later in the 1931 Oldsmobile for which I went into debt for $225, payable at $10 a month). But there was so much to do on campus—canoeing, volleyball, Ping-Pong, tennis—that we really never had to leave it for our social contacts. Emily and I used to double on the tennis court with my good friend Charles Massey and a girl from Michigan he went with occasionally.

  What I did not notice was the growing friendship between Emily and Charles, who was a sophisticated senior with plans to go on to Harvard. In my own infatuation, I was sure she was the woman God meant for me to marry. So I proposed to her . . . in writing . . . during the first summer vacation! She told me she would have to think about it. I could not imagine why.

  During the fall semester of that second year, it seemed she was growing more favorable to the idea, and my hopes soared along with my assumptions. One night after we attended a service together at a black church, she indicated that she would say yes to my letter. From then on, I guess I considered us engaged, even though I had not given her a ring. After the turn of the year, though, she seemed to be having second thoughts, and they apparently lingered through the spring.

  At the close of school each spring, we celebrated Class Night, the social event of the year. On that May day in 1938, Dr. Minder took several of us fellows to Larson’s Florist in Tampa to get flowers for our dates. This was a real splurge for most of us, with our limited finances. The going rate was 25¢ for a corsage, but I ins
isted on a 50¢ corsage for Emily!

  When she did not wear my flowers to the party, I was perplexed. During a break in the festivities, we walked down to the river and sat in a swing hanging from a tree branch. I asked her to explain. She did not hesitate to tell me, quite gently but firmly, that she was in love with Charlie and would not marry me.

  Charles Massey was one of the best preachers I ever heard as a student. In fact, on my very first weekend in Florida, I listened to his superb preaching at a student street meeting in Sulphur Springs—a meeting at which Roy Gustafson played his trumpet. I used to look forward to any chance of hearing Charles when I was not on an assignment myself.

  But Emily and Charles? Incredible!

  That woeful night in the spring of 1938 when she called it quits between us was Paradise Lost for me. In my despondency, I looked up Dr. Minder after my fellow students had gone back to their dorm rooms. I wept out my misery to his understanding ears.

  But my problem was deeper than losing a girlfriend, and in my heart I admitted it. The issue was not trying to do something to please her and win her back. Her new boyfriend had wooed and won her fair and square. The issue was doing what pleased the Lord. If I refused that, could I expect the future to hold any happiness?

  For some weeks, triggered by a profoundly searching sermon in chapel, I paced those deserted, echoing streets of Temple Terrace. In the moonlight, a soft southern breeze stirred the wispy Spanish moss that draped the trees on the golf course. I never felt so alone in my life—or so close to God. I walked through the late-night hours, struggling with the Holy Spirit over the call of God to be a minister. That was the last thing I wanted to be, and I had used all kinds of rationalizations to convince God to let me do something else.

  I had the same sense of uncertainty in Charlotte nearly four years before, standing in the sawdust shavings of Mordecai Ham’s tabernacle. There I did what I felt I should do: commit my eternal destiny to the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ. But was I now being asked to commit the rest of my life on earth to serving Him in a way that I did not particularly relish?