When Christ Calls, Will You Know It?

Steve Elliott was 8 years old the last time he attended a crusade. It was a hot August night in Georgia, and he was sitting with his grandma and her friends. It was the late 1930s.

“Repent!” the visiting preacher boomed, cheeks wagging, sweat pouring off his reddened face.

“He was quite a sight to behold,” said Elliott, 66. “We were sitting in a holey, old, white tent, about 100 of us, mostly people from the town. There was tension in the air; you couldn’t help but feel it. Grandma said it would be a great night, that people would be saved.

“I remembered feeling scared. What did they need to be saved from? What awful thing was happening that night?”

Elliott suspects a big difference between altar calls then and now. Which is why he attended the first night of the Billy Graham Crusade in Sacramento Wednesday.

While waiting for Graham to appear, Elliott, a retired insurance salesman and Presbyterian elder, slips back to Georgia and the big white tent.

He remembers people streaming forward, crying and waving their hands in the air as the preacher admonished his transfixed flock to take Jesus into their hearts. He watched Mr. Miles, the grocer, go forward as well as the man who delivered wood around town.

Near the end of the service, parents hustled school-aged children up to the front row of chairs when the preacher asked for “the little lambs.”

Elliott was one of these.

His grandmother left him in a hard wood chair, saying, “Now don’t worry. Just follow your heart. Open your heart to Jesus, boy.”

The evangelist told the lambs the walk toward Jesus was like a long tunnel of light and, if they believed, they’d see Jesus calling them from the other end. Elliott squeezed his eyes shut tight and looked hard for Jesus.

“Come to Jesus. Come to Jesus,” the preacher said.

An older girl who was envied about town for her sweet looks and lovely disposition got up crying. Half a dozen plainer girls followed. After sneaking a peek, Elliott squeezed his eyes tighter.

“Don’t you see Jesus?” the preacher continued.

“Finally it was just me and two other boys sitting there, two of the orneriest, naughtiest boys in school,” Elliott said. “My grandmother was sitting behind me praying loudly to Jesus. Her friends were praying, too.”

When the two other boys got up to be saved, Elliott went, too. He wasn’t about to be the only sinner. He’s been a Christian ever since, but not because he saw Jesus waiting at the end of the tunnel that night.

“I’ve always wondered since: Does anyone ever know, truly, that they’ve been called to Christ? I’ve been going to church for all these years, but I don’t know what it’s like to be called.”

Crusade counselors said they were trained to expect people answering Graham’s call for a variety of reasons. Some would be rededicating their lives; others would be coming to Christ for the first time. Still others would be especially hurting.

Most of the counselors from local churches I spoke to volunteered because they felt “called” to do so.

“I have such a deep desire to have people know Jesus like I do,” counselor Janet Hartsgrove of Orangevale said.

In 20 years of being a Christian, Toni Trier has heard the calling - strongly - twice. I told them Elliott’s story, and how he was hoping to hear a strong calling himself that night.

“It’s not an audible call,” Trier said. “It’s a knowing in your heart.”

“Oh, he’ll know it when it happens,” Hartsgrove said.

The Rev. Billy Graham took to the podium after Gov. Pete Wilson introduced him as “a national and international treasure.” He told stories and cracked jokes. He shared the Christian gospel in that soothing, grandfatherly voice that now marks his ministry in these later years.

But it is still a voice of faith.

A voice of action.

A voice of love.

I could see Elliott in Section 120 of the arena from my seat. He clapped and sometimes laughed. I do not know what he was thinking. But when the altar call came - as nearly a thousand people inside or outside streamed forward - Elliott, arms folded across his chest, remained steadfastly in his seat.

I couldn’t reach him before my deadline. But I suspect he knew the Christian life he’d found, without the flashy “calling,” had been enough after all.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Diana Griego Erwin McClatchy News Service