by Billy Graham
The tabernacle was well filled all the time. One reason for the good attendance was Dr. Ham’s choice of lively topics, like the Second Coming of Christ. Mother had read about the Second Coming in the Book of Revelation, of course, but I did not recall having heard of it. He also preached on subjects such as money, infidelity, the Sabbath, and drinking.
I had never heard a sermon on Hell, either, though I was familiar with some people’s use of that term as a swear word. Certainly our clergyman, Dr. Lindsay, never mentioned that it was a real place, even though I know he believed there was a Hell. But Dr. Ham left no doubt about it in anybody’s mind!
That was not to say Dr. Ham neglected or minimized the great love of God. He just put it against a background of sin and judgment and Hell in a novel way that fascinated me. His words, and his way with words, grabbed my mind, gripped my heart. What startled me was that the same preacher who warned us so dramatically about the horrible fate of the lost in the everlasting lake of fire and brimstone also had a tremendous sense of humor and could tell stories almost as good as my father’s.
I became deeply convicted about my sinfulness and rebellion. And confused. How could this evangelist be talking to me, of all people? I had been baptized as a baby, had learned the Shorter Catechism word perfect, and had been confirmed in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church with the full approval of the pastor and elders. I had gotten into mischief once in a while, but I could hardly be called wicked. I resisted temptations to break the moral code my parents had so strictly instilled in me. I was a good milker in the dairy barn and never complained about any of the nasty work, such as shoveling manure. I was even the vice president of my youth group in our church (although, granted, it wasn’t a particularly vital organization).
So why would the evangelist always be pointing his bony finger at me?
One thing that echoed in my mind was Dr. Ham’s singing, right in the middle of his sermon, “The toils of the road will seem nothing, when I get to the end of the way.”
He had an almost embarrassing way of describing sins and shortcomings, and of demanding, on pain of divine judgment, that we mend our ways. I was so sure he had singled me out one night that I actually ducked behind the wide-brimmed hat of the lady sitting in front of me. Yet, as uncomfortable as I was getting to be, I simply could not stay away.
At the meetings, I struck up an acquaintance with a likable student from the notorious Central High School, Grady Wilson. He was already a Christian, but he was having some problems of his own under Dr. Ham’s preaching. He had an older, unconverted brother, Thomas Walter, called T.W. by everybody, a big fellow who could be pretty rough. I would not call him a bully, at least not to his face, but I could safely describe him as burly. T.W. could certainly have had a job as a bouncer!
Grady and I had both decided on a strategy to avoid the frontal attack by Dr. Ham. We had signed up for the choir, which sat on the platform behind the preacher. Neither of us could sing, but we could move our mouths or hold a hymnbook in front of our faces for camouflage. As choir members, we were safe from Dr. Ham’s accusatory stare.
Another person who was very important to me at the time of the Ham meetings was my first cousin Crook Stafford. He lived in town and had a job as an accountant. Some years my senior, he always went out of his way to be kind and thoughtful to me as we were growing up. He not only encouraged me to go to the tabernacle in the evenings, but he would drive out and get me if I had no one to take me. He also was in the choir.
What was slowly dawning on me during those weeks was the miserable realization that I did not know Jesus Christ for myself. I could not depend on my parents’ faith. Christian influence in the home could have a lasting impact on a child’s life, but faith could not be passed on as an inheritance, like the family silver. It had to be exercised by each individual.
I could not depend on my church membership either. Saying “I believe” in the Apostles’ Creed every Sunday, or taking the bread and wine of Communion, could so easily become nothing but rote and ritual, without power in themselves to make me any different.
Nor could I depend on my own resolution to do better. I constantly failed in my efforts at self-improvement. Nobody needed to tell me that.
As a teenager, what I needed to know for certain was that I was right with God. I could not help but admit to myself that I was purposeless and empty-hearted. Our family Bible reading, praying, psalm-singing, and churchgoing—all these had left me restless and resentful. I had even tried, guiltily, to think up ways of getting out of all those activities as much as I could. In a word, I was spirit-ually dead.
And then it happened, sometime around my sixteenth birthday. On that night, Dr. Ham finished preaching and gave the Invitation to accept Christ. After all his tirades against sin, he gave us a gentle reminder: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, KJV). His song leader, Mr. Ramsay, led us all in “Just As I Am”—four verses. Then we started another song: “Almost Persuaded, Now to Believe.”
On the last verse of that second song, I responded. I walked down to the front, feeling as if I had lead weights attached to my feet, and stood in the space before the platform. That same night, perhaps three or four hundred other people were there at the front making spiritual commitments. The next night, my cousin Crook Stafford made his decision for Christ.
My heart sank when I looked over at the lady standing next to me with tears running down her cheeks. I was not crying. I did not feel any special emotion of any kind just then. Maybe, I thought, I was not supposed to be there. Maybe my good intentions to be a real Christian wouldn’t last. Wondering if I was just making a fool of myself, I almost turned around and went back to my seat.
As I stood in front of the platform, a tailor named J. D. Prevatt, who was a friend of our family with a deep love for souls, stepped up beside me, weeping. Putting his arms around me, he urged me to make my decision. At the same time, in his heavy European accent, he explained God’s plan for my salvation in a simple way. That explanation was addressed to my own mental understanding. It did not necessarily answer every question I had at the moment—and it certainly did not anticipate every question that would come to me in the months and years ahead—but it set forth simply the facts I needed to know in order to become God’s child.
My tailor friend helped me to understand what I had to do to become a genuine Christian. The key word was do. Those of us standing up front had to decide to do something about what we knew before it could take effect.
He prayed for me and guided me to pray. I had heard the message, and I had felt the inner compulsion to go forward. Now came the moment to commit myself to Christ. Intellectually, I accepted Christ to the extent that I acknowledged what I knew about Him to be true. That was mental assent. Emotionally, I felt that I wanted to love Him in return for His loving me. But the final issue was whether I would turn myself over to His rule in my life.
I checked “Recommitment” on the card I filled out. After all, I had been brought up to regard my baptism and confirmation as professions of faith too. The difference was that this time I was doing it on purpose, doing it with intention. For all my previous religious upbringing and church activity, I believe that that was the moment I made my real commitment to Jesus Christ.
No bells went off inside me. No signs flashed across the tabernacle ceiling. No physical palpitations made me tremble. I wondered again if I was a hypocrite, not to be weeping or something. I simply felt at peace. Quiet, not delirious. Happy and peaceful.
My father came to the front and put his arm around my shoulders, telling me how thankful he was. Later, back home, when we went to the kitchen, my mother put her arm around me and said, “Billy Frank, I’m so glad you took the stand you did tonight.”
That was all.
I went upstairs to my room. Standing at the window, I looked out across one of the fields that was glowing in the moonlight.
Then
I went over to my bed and for the first time in my life got down on my knees without being told to do so. I really wanted to talk to God. “Lord, I don’t know what happened to me tonight,” I prayed. “You know. And I thank You for the privilege I’ve had tonight.”
It took a while to fall asleep. How could I face school tomorrow? Would this action spoil my relationships with friends who were not interested in spiritual matters? Might Coach Eudy, who had publicly expressed his dislike of Dr. Ham, make fun of me? Perhaps. I felt pretty sure, though, that the school principal, Connor Hutchinson, whose history lessons I enjoyed, would be sympathetic.
But the hardest question of all remained to be answered: What, exactly, had happened to me?
All I knew was that the world looked different the next morning when I got up to do the milking, eat breakfast, and catch the schoolbus. There seemed to be a song in my heart, but it was mixed with a kind of pounding fear as to what might happen when I got to class.
The showdown at school was not too bad. For one thing, most of the students had not heard about what I had done at the Ham meeting the night before. Besides that, the change I felt so strongly inside me did not make me look or sound any different. I was still Billy Frank to them, and their attitude did not change. Studies and ball games and dates and chores on the farm—all these stayed pretty much the same. I was still just a high-spirited schoolboy.
I invited Sam Paxton, Wint Covington, and some of my other friends from high school to go with me to the Ham meetings. They did go once or twice, but somehow they did not respond as I had.
“I understand we have Preacher Graham with us today,” one of my teachers said to the class some days later. Everybody laughed. She was making fun of me, and I felt some resentment. Then I remembered what Dr. Ham had said: when we come to Christ, we’re going to suffer persecution.
It would take some time before I understood what had happened to me well enough to explain it to anybody else. There were signs, though, that my thinking and direction had changed, that I had truly been converted. To my own surprise, church activities that had bored me before seemed interesting all of a sudden—even Dr. Lindsay’s sermons (which I took notes on!). The choir sounded better to me. I actually wanted to go to church as often as possible.
The Bible, which had been familiar to me almost since infancy, drew me now to find out what it said besides the verses I had memorized through the years. I enjoyed the few minutes I could take when I was by myself each morning and evening for quiet talking to God in prayer. As one of Mr. Ramsay’s former choir members, I was even singing hymns while I milked the cows!
Before my conversion, I tended to be touchy, oversensitive, envious of others, and irritable. Now I deliberately tried to be courteous and kind to everybody around me. I was experiencing what the Apostle Paul had described: “The old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Mother especially, but other family members too, thought there was a difference. Most remarkable of all—to me at least—was an uncharacteristic enthusiasm for my studies! (It was about this time that I read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.)
Looking back now, I’m sure I spent entirely too much time working on the farm and playing baseball during my boyhood, and not enough time with the books. But what good would school do for me if I was going to be a farmer?
Purpose was still missing from my outlook on life in general. Although I had been converted, I did not have much of a concept of my life coming under some kind of divine plan. In the remaining year and a half of high school, I had no inkling of what my life work was to be. The future was foggy at best. But I could tell from my changed interests and new satisfactions that spiritual growth was going on.
In the following year, other revivalists and evangelists came through Charlotte. I went to hear most of them. Two or three were invited to stay in our home. Jimmie Johnson was one. Just out of college, he was young and handsome, and his devotion to Christ flashed in his dark eyes as he preached the Gospel in all of its power to the crowds that came to hear him.
One weekend we drove Jimmie out to Monroe, North Caro-lina, where he was to speak in a little jail. When preaching to prisoners, he always liked to give young Christians a chance to help out. This time, without warning, he picked on me. “Here’s a fellow who’ll tell you what it’s like to be converted,” he said, nodding at me with a smile of encouragement.
I tried, with my knees knocking. The ten or so prisoners looked off into the distance or picked their teeth for the two or three minutes I spoke. Jimmie claimed that I did quite well, once I got going. It was the first public utterance I had given of my faith, but it reinforced my conviction that I would never become a preacher.
Another time we went with a group to a home for wayward girls, where I gave a brief testimony. After the service, several of the girls made a profession of faith. I was surprised to recognize one of them; she had lived for some time with a tenant family on our farm. She promised to live a Christian life. I had only $5 in my pocket, and I thought it only right to give it to her.
Out of Jimmie Johnson’s youth revival in the Methodist church in Charlotte there developed a Tuesday night Bible-study group of young people, the Fellowship Club. Some 20 to 30 boys and girls from different Charlotte churches were invited to the large home of “Mommy” Jones, wife of a telephone company executive, who taught the Bible in her own lovable and dynamic way. We studied outside on her screened porch in the summer and in the living room in the winter. Afterward we crowded into her old-fashioned kitchen to eat wheat biscuits and jam and drink milk or coffee, chattering about what we had learned and generally having a good time. Grady, T.W., and I were nearly always there.
In my changing outlook, I did not feel entirely at home with some of my friends, though I still liked them all. I’d had several girlfriends over the years, sometimes two at once, but I decided I had to quit going with my current one. She had not accepted Christ and wasn’t in sympathy with me.
When Grady announced one day that he felt the Lord was calling him to be a preacher, we all were as proud as could be. He had gotten two or three sermons from Jimmie and had practiced them. When he got a chance to speak at a small mission church across the tracks in Charlotte, I took a friend along to hear him. There were about 20 people in the audience.
Grady did not have a watch, so he borrowed mine. He announced his text and said that he was going to preach on “Four Great Things God Wants You to Do.”
After nearly a half-hour of speaking, he said, “We now come to the second thing.”
I sat there very proud that Grady knew so much of the Bible. He never once looked at my watch—he talked for an hour and a half—but all the while he was preaching, he kept winding it until he had wound the stem right off. He claimed it was because I had been holding hands with his girlfriend.
Jimmie and Fred Brown, another evangelist who stayed in our home, were graduates of Bob Jones College in Cleveland, Ten-nessee. They did a good job of convincing me I should go on to college somewhere.
I vaguely supposed I would try to get into the University of North Carolina, though I wondered whether that institution would accept me in view of my mediocre high school grades. But when the founder and president of Jimmie and Fred’s college, Dr. Bob Jones himself, spoke at our high school in my senior year, my folks decided it would be best for me to go there. We did not know at the time that it was not accredited. T.W. had already started there, and Grady also decided to enroll.
Dr. Bob was an old-fashioned Methodist who had not only been offered the appointment to become a bishop but also often told us he could have been governor of Alabama if he had wanted to. He was a very dramatic orator. Fiftyish and over six feet tall, he charmed us students with his witty stories and quick answers to our questions. It was obvious that he loved young people. Earlier, as an evangelist drawing large crowds, he had determined to found a college where students could get a higher education in a vigorously Christian setting. He received large lov
e offerings from his audiences, which was the way traveling evangelists were supported in those days, and had saved them up until at last he was able to found his college.
Influence from a totally different direction came through Albert McMakin, who had first taken me to hear Mordecai Ham. After years of working with his father and brothers on our farm, he got himself a job with the Fuller Brush Company. By our standards, he was making fairly good money as a field manager in his South Carolina territory. Just before I graduated from high school in 1936, he asked, in his slow southern drawl, if I would be willing to join him in selling brushes through the summer.
It seemed like a perfect way to make some money for college. My father was in a financial position to help me some, but I knew I would also have to work part-time. Daddy didn’t think much of the plan, maybe because he pictured losing a fast milker. Finally, though, he said, “If you want to go, go.” He and Mother had a great deal of confidence in Albert, both as a worker and as a strong Christian. (Maybe more confidence in him than in me!)
As soon as I graduated with my twenty-five Sharon High School classmates in May, Albert and I set out together. But after my first week or two, I told him I was getting lonesome way down there in South Carolina, so far from home. “How about if we ask a couple of my friends to come with us?” I suggested. He readily agreed.
With enthusiasm I spelled out my plan to my high school buddies Wint Covington and Sam Paxton. They turned the opportunity down because they had already made other plans for the summer. Then I talked to my new friends Grady and T.W. They both accepted, so the three of us joined Albert on the road to sell brushes.
South Carolina had one of the lowest per-capita incomes of any state back then. Staying in boardinghouses, where a room and meals cost $1 a day, we ate at the same table with a lot of coarse-talking, rough-living traveling salesmen. I’m afraid some of their uncouth attitudes rubbed off on me. One day in Lancaster, the boardinghouse biscuits were so hard we could barely bite into them. I got upset and fast-pitched a biscuit right back through the kitchen door at the cook.