Youthful Focus In Closing Stages Of His Ministry, Billy Graham Wants To Do More For The Nation’s Children

“As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work.” John 9:4.

Ask Billy Graham his greatest surprise in life, and his reply is immediate: “The brevity of it.”

He is 78. His hands are weakened and his balance is sometimes shaky from Parkinson’s disease and vertigo. But to him and to many of his followers, it seems like only yesterday that he was the young, broad-shouldered, square-jawed fiery evangelical, meeting President Truman in the Oval Office or leading a 16-week crusade at Madison Square Garden in the ‘50s.

However, even as he continues to lead crusades - the most recent in April in San Antonio - Graham recognizes the time has come for summing up one of the most remarkable evangelistic careers in American religious history.

Two years ago, at Graham’s urging, his son Franklin was appointed his successor-in-waiting as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. And this month comes the release of his memoirs of a remarkable life in ministry.

“Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham” deals with much the same material biographer William Martin, who had the evangelist’s full cooperation, covered in 1991 in “Prophet With Honor: The Billy Graham Story.”

The 760-page book recounts Graham’s experiences preaching to more than 230 million people in 180 countries and territories, including his ground-breaking visits to places like the Soviet Union and North Korea.

He recounts how he broke with prominent fundamentalists to build a broad evangelical alliance that eventually would welcome Roman Catholics to his crusades. He describes his own efforts at seeking racial justice, from demanding his crusades be integrated to endorsing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

America’s pastor has also been a presidential chaplain, and his experiences - from advising Dwight Eisenhower, to backing school integration, to encouraging Gerald Ford to grant former President Richard Nixon a pardon - add the ultimate insider’s perspective on the mix of religion and White House politics.

In fact, if he could live his life over again, Graham writes in his autobiography, he would avoid any semblance of involvement in partisan politics. The presidential staffs of Nixon and Lyndon Johnson used him to some degree to further their re-election goals, he said in a recent telephone interview.

What readers may find most striking about the autobiography is not the oft-told tales of public events but the glimpses into the private life of the man who has consistently made the list of America’s 10 most admired men over the past four decades.

He takes you to the side of his wife, Ruth, as he prays with her before an operation for spinal meningitis.

The Bible text Graham shares as he holds his wife’s hand is not one promising the best possible temporal outcome, but the passage in the first chapter of 1 Peter that speaks of the “lively hope” of eternal life brought about by the Resurrection of Jesus.

“Those words reminded us of the hope we have in Christ, assuring us that whether if Ruth survived the operation or not, God would always keep her in his loving care,” Graham writes.

And he speaks candidly of one of his greatest regrets: leaving his children during their growing-up years for months at a time.

Once, during the summer of 1960, he said it took him several minutes to realize “that the beautiful little child wandering out to greet us” after a long trip was his youngest son, Ned. Both Franklin and Ned Graham would go through rebellious periods during which they used drugs, Graham said.

“Every day I was absent from my family is gone forever,” writes Graham, regretting the time spent in meetings and engagements that seem less important with the passage of time.

In his remaining years, Graham wants to help the Clintons with their agenda of meeting the needs of the nation’s children. Children’s meetings have become a part of his crusades, and Graham urges churches to focus their attention on children in need.

“I want to do far more than I have in the past in helping these children,” Graham said.

Today, his sons are leading international ministries, and Franklin is becoming a successful evangelist on his own. And the father must face something he never thought much about: old age.

In the 1950s Graham said he thought he would not live a long life because the pace of his ministry was sure to kill him. As he approached his 60s, he thought he would end up like his father, who had the first in a series of strokes at that age.

Today, because of Parkinson’s, he has some weakness in his hands that make him unable to write letters. He has symptoms of vertigo that causes him to fall once in a while.

Also, doctors ask him to nap twice a day.

But growing older is not so bad, Graham is finding out. For one thing, eternity is right around the corner.

“I know that soon my life will be over. I thank God for it and for all He has given me in his life,” Graham writes. “But I look forward to heaven.”

When he gets there, Graham said, the second thing he plans to do with God is engage in a little Bible study, to ask about some of the seeming contradictions in biblical figures and to find out the answers to such mysteries as how God can have no beginning and no end.

But first he has another question.

“Why me, Lord? Why did you choose a farm boy from North Carolina to preach to so many people, to have such a wonderful team of associates, and to have a part in what You were doing in the latter half of the 20th century?

“I have thought about that question a great deal,” Graham writes at the end of his autobiography, “but I know also that only God knows the answer.”