Dear Friends,
My first awareness of Billy Graham was as a child in Southeast Ohio. Living, as my Ashland friends would say, way “out in the county,” my family received only one television station, and my siblings and I set our activity clocks by certain favorite television programs. We watched Saturday morning Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera cartoons with nearly religious attention, spilling milk over the sides of our cereal bowls as we jostled for the location of optimal viewing.
Now and then, as with today, an important event would bump our favorite programming: the Olympics, the Watergate hearings, space launches. We resented anything that interrupted our precious TV schedule.
I remember the Billy Graham Crusade as one such occasional interruption. Great auditoriums of people. Enormous singing choirs. Closeups of people in the audience smiling or nodding or weeping. And the cadences of Graham’s firm, Southern voice assuring all of us of God’s love.
While the interruption disappointed my childish desire for more indolent viewing, something of the experience stayed with me, even with little active attention. The Billy Graham Crusades became part of the landscape of my life, along with Huntley and Brinkley, Marlin Perkins, and Walt Disney. (Younger folks: consult Google.)
I would run into Graham throughout life – during both the years I abandoned the Church and the years following my return – not only on television, but in newspapers, in conversations, and later in religious study, where his name cropped up in an astonishing number of articles and books that were part of my research. My return to God had been influenced, in great part, by the recognition that some of the finest minds in history and around the world were devoted to Jesus Christ. What did they know that I did not?
Graham was one such person for me. I noted his influence, his following. I noted the respect with which world leaders regarded him, seeking conversation with and counsel from him. I sit in his second, wider circle of cultural influence, even though I never intentionally followed his ministry. I am certainly not alone in this. How remarkable, the reach of God’s hand to so many millions of people through this one committed, faithful preacher of the Gospel! I know of no one else in our time who can make the same claim.
Wishing you every blessing,
Mtr. TJ