Just As I Am

by Billy Graham

  So I turned to Jack Shuler’s song leader, Cliff Barrows. He and his wife, Billie, said they would be thrilled to go. From time to time, Cliff and I had crossed paths; I had seen him lead the singing at Winona Lake, for example, and thought he had done a fine job. So Cliff and Billie Barrows came to my rescue. During this summer of 1946, I recruited them to form a team, with Cliff to lead the singing, Billie to play the piano, me to do the preaching. Ruth would do the praying while I preached. (Right from the start, Cliff, in order to distinguish between me and his wife, called me Bill.)

  We had no idea how long we would be gone.

  We got on a ship in New York and sailed to Southampton, where Gavin met us, along with a young Methodist preacher, Joe Blinco, and a leading evangelical layman in that part of England, Oliver Stott. They had already set up meetings in Southampton’s Methodist Central Hall.

  After arriving in England early in October, we conducted rallies throughout England and Wales. In the early part of the tour, we spent a weekend in Wales in the home of a non-Christian couple who gave us the best they had, which wasn’t much on the husband’s meager income of £3 or £4 per week. That visit gave us a real appreciation for the hardships they endured. For breakfast we had a heated tomato, along with a hot drink that was more chicory than coffee. Later in the day, we had some chicken soup (though I’m not sure a chicken had ever passed through it), along with some bread. George Wilson was with us to handle the arrangements and finances for YFC, and he and I had a single bed to sleep in. So we took turns: halfway through the night, we exchanged places, the one who had been sleeping on the floor moving up to the bed. It was very cold, especially for the one on the floor, because there was no heat whatsoever.

  Ruth did not feel free to join me until December 9. From behind a fence at the London airport, as I waited for the passengers to get through customs, I jokingly shouted to Ruth that the customs inspector was going to put her in jail. It did not seem funny to her at the time!

  Although she got a warm, husbandly reception from me, she got a damp, chilly one from England. At one of the first meetings she attended, the fog inside the church was so thick that it looked as if everyone were smoking. From the platform, I could not even see the back of the church. Despite the presence of a potbellied barrel with some hot coals in it where the transept and main aisle crossed, it was as bitter cold inside the church as outside.

  And Ruth had difficulty adjusting to the food rationing most British had to endure. When she first tasted the powdered scrambled eggs, she thought she would choke; these eggs had never seen a chicken, she managed to say. And the sausages were made out of bread. But outside of London, the people gave us eggs and bacon, probably their whole week’s ration. And everybody still seemed to have plenty of tea.

  In Reading one evening, the building was packed with people. Halfway through my sermon, I heard a voice of protest coming from someone in the middle of the church. The speaker was a minister wearing an ecclesiastical collar; I could not tell his denomination, for all British ministers wore such collars. “I don’t believe a word of it,” he shouted, claiming that I was teaching heresy.

  When a woman in the balcony stood up and got into a public argument with the minister, his wife got hold of his coat and tried to pull him down. He kept on shouting, though, trying all the while to free himself from his wife’s grasp. The ushers got hold of him finally and led him from the church.

  I knew that the Anglican Church was the state church, and the most important church in Britain, but I had very little knowledge of its history. What I did know I had learned in a church history course taught by Dr. Minder at Florida Bible Institute. This was one of my first times to preach in an Anglican church.

  It was at that church that I met John Cordle, who had driven down from London in a car whose windows had been broken in. When I rode back with him, the car’s interior was ice cold. We had to hold pieces of cardboard in the window spaces to keep from freezing to death.

  At Bradford one evening, we held a meeting in the local theater after the movie. The chairman of the meeting happened to be a certain Mr. Bradford. When Ruth entered the unlighted doorway, she itched to turn on bright spotlights and to pass out handbills to the people passing by; unfortunately, neither option was available to her. Taking a seat as Billie began the piano prelude, Ruth counted an audience of six grown people (including herself), four youngsters, and a big black cat snoozing on the back of a seat.

  The stage curtain was not rolled up far enough to conceal the advertisements painted on it:

  LEG TROUBLES

  VARICOSE VEINS

  RHEUMATISM

  SAY IT WITH FLOWERS

  SNACK BAR

  On the stage backdrop, in gaudy greens, yellows, and reds, was painted a garden scene that looked to Ruth like rows of green mausoleums leading to a central fountain.

  But people steadily dribbled in until there was a respectable attendance by the time Billie Barrows had finished her prelude. Under Cliff’s direction, they sang the lively old Charles Wesley hymn “And Can It Be?” When I invited them to receive Christ after my sermon on the rich young ruler, twenty-three came forward for counseling and prayer with the four of us.

  Ruth was somewhat more impressed at the local Baptist church, which seated one thousand. Before the recently hired minister had arrived, Sunday attendance had averaged nine in the morning and twenty at night. Yet one hundred showed up for our morning service. Ruth’s enthusiasm for the whole enterprise grew as we saw people respond to the Word of God.

  With forty, perhaps fifty rallies behind us by mid-December, we were very tired and ready for a break. Somewhere Ruth saw an ad featuring a palm tree waving in southern France. Since we were chilled to the bone, we immediately made reservations. We took off from London for the hour-and-a-half flight to Paris on December 16, landing on an airstrip that was covered, where there had been bomb craters, with heavy net wire over the soft brown earth.

  We were fortunate to get a taxi driver for our sight-seeing; he was a Russian expatriate and could speak GI American. He said, “Hokay, Jackson,” to everything, so we called him Jackson. (His real name was something like Leon Poustilnik.) He took us out to Versailles Palace, where Ruth thought the guide looked as if he had been there since the days of Louis XIV. At the old Roman amphitheater in Nîmes, south of Paris, she wondered whether the structure might ever be used again as a place for throwing Christians to the lions. In that historic area where so many Huguenots had been slain, we met with fellow believers and enjoyed eating with them and smiling at them, but very little conversation; we did not really know each other’s language. But we had a refreshing time; we prayed together, they in French and we in English.

  With tremendous anticipation, we headed for Nice to spend Christmas. Our first glimpse of the beautiful Mediterranean was through the train windows en route from Marseilles. On the other side of the tracks, though, along the coast, ruins of houses flattened by the war alternated with pillboxes.

  Our spirits really took a dive when we learned that the hotel we had planned to stay in could not (or would not) honor our reservations. Without a word of warning from our travel agent, we had been bumped to the Balmoral Hotel in Monte Carlo. We knew very little about the tiny principality tucked along the shore between France and Italy, but we knew enough to ask ourselves how an evangelistic team could find rest in a gambling resort. Ruth and Billie were especially appalled.

  At the Balmoral’s front desk, I flinched when I found out that the bill would run $5 per day for two persons, including meals. We just could not afford that. But then I had an inspiration. We were carrying with us a large quantity of women’s nylon stockings. Why, I did not know, but Mr. Cole, a hosiery manufacturer in North Carolina, knowing of the shortages in Europe, had given them to me for whatever eventuality. I gingerly inquired of the hotel manager if he might just consider a payment under the barter system—my contribution being something that not only would be of interest to his wife but a
lso was impossible to obtain anywhere else in Europe.

  His eyes were overjoyed when he heard my proposition, but his voice was subdued. He just might consider it, he said, if word did not get around to the other guests. As a pastor, I told him, I knew the meaning of confidentiality. Each morning, then, in the privacy of his office, I presented him with a pair of nylons, and each morning he marked our bill, which included not only our room but also three meals, paid. Ten pairs for ten days. And ten more pairs for Cliff and Billie’s room.

  So began our life of “luxury” in Monte Carlo, overlooking the Mediterranean, where rarities like fruit, butter, and eggs were available. And there was wine in abundance, which Ruth thought was the nastiest stuff she had ever tasted. She was astonished to see children drinking it instead of milk. For five or six days I walked past pineapples for sale, wishing I could have one to eat. Billie, Cliff, Ruth, and I joined in praying for that fruit, which was selling at the time for the equivalent of $5 a pineapple. (We never did try one.) That’s not the only flavor we craved: for a chocolate soda—if we could have found such a treat along the Riviera—we would gladly have traded two pairs of nylons. Then poor Billie Barrows came down with the flu and couldn’t enjoy food of any kind for a time.

  The blissful quiet of Christmas Eve was shattered five minutes before midnight with a cannon blast that nearly blew us out of bed. Was it war all over again? No, it was just some friendly fire—blast after blast every minute until midnight, when the explosions were replaced by the ringing of all the church bells, summoning the Monegasques to Mass. After services, the people drank and danced in the streets until dawn, but we slept through most of their celebration.

  On Christmas afternoon, Ruth and I took a horse and buggy ride toward the Italian border. Everywhere along the way we saw evidence of the war; building after building was pockmarked with shell holes. It was a sobering reminder of the suffering so many had experienced so recently. And everywhere, because they had no money, girls were trying to sell themselves, which grieved us both greatly. We were deeply burdened and prayed daily for the people of Europe who had suffered so much and now had so little.

  Further meetings had been scheduled in Great Britain early in the new year. A couple of days after Christmas, we headed north, with stopovers in Geneva and elsewhere in Switzerland. Coffee on the Swedish airliner was the genuine article, and we were happy with a hotel room that overlooked the Rhône River. It was nice to see Kleenex again, and chewing gum. Ruth exclaimed with delight when we were served bottled Cokes at lunch!

  On January 3, 1947, we took the train to Paris for a day’s sight-seeing before an evening flight to London. At the station, the redcap responded rudely to Ruth. We four Americans, and an Indian army major who had shared our compartment, traded heated comments with the Frenchman through two Dutch travelers who came to our rescue as interpreters. Ruth thought it might be a good thing to meet more such obnoxious people; it would be a way of getting our blood pressure pumped up and thus getting warm enough to fight off the damp and the cold in England!

  Where was Jackson, our Russian taxi driver, when we needed him? He finally appeared and showed us some more sights. We were disappointed at not being able to see the Bastille. It had been torn down 150 years earlier, he informed us—but that was news to us. At Napoleon’s Tomb, the guide told us men to take off our hats in respect to the emperor’s memory. And we managed to stop in a shop where Cliff and I bought inexpensive rabbit-fur coats for our wives.

  Due to fog in London, our plane flight was canceled. We had to make reservations for the train to Calais the next morning, where we would get the ferry to England. After Jackson drove us to the station, he gave me some francs for our breakfast on the train. I gave him a Gospel of John, praying that he would read it (or at least use it to practice his English).

  Riding through northern France, we again saw more war damage—buildings and bridges in ruins, and fields pitted with shell holes, craters, foxholes, and machine-gun nests. Crossing the English Channel, we saw the white cliffs of Dover, made so famous in the popular wartime song.

  The creature comforts we had been reintroduced to on the Continent were still pretty much lacking in the English Midlands that winter. There was no central heat in the Westleigh Hotel, where we stayed. The common bath at the end of the drafty hall was also unheated. The small gas heater in our room ran only on the endless insertion of penny coins. Ruth huddled beside it in her robe, getting scorched on one side and frostbitten on the other. She moved away a little when Billie Barrows came in to say that Cliff had stuck his fountain pen too near their heater; it had caught fire and burned up before he could put the flame out.

  Overcrowding in the hotel forced some rearrangements. The manager shifted Ruth and me to his private sitting room, which had a daybed with four thin blankets. Ruth had to put on a sweater and two pairs of pants under her pajamas, and she slept with her slippers on. She was still cold, so she got up and added her wool robe and her rabbit-fur coat. I had on long wool underwear, flannel pajamas, wool socks, a heavy wool sweater, and a big overcoat. No wonder so many Britons had such ruddy cheeks in those days!

  Gigi was just a year old and staying with the Bells in Montreat. We never tired of getting reports about her, but poor Ruth reached a point where she wrote in desperation to her folks from Paris. “I closed my eyes yesterday just to picture her, and you know, it was hard for me to remember just how she looks even. In a way it does not seem like I have a little girl at all.”

  After two months, Ruth felt she had to return home to our little daughter, Gigi, for whom she had longed every day. I still had two more months of meetings scheduled in Great Britain, so she would fly home alone on February 4. Our meetings had already started in Ireland by the day of her departure—we were staying in a tiny rooming house on the coast about fifteen miles out of Dublin, and the icy wind blew from morning to night. I had the flu and I had to kiss her good-bye without being able to take her to the airport. I was very lonely when she left and got a little homesick. But Ruth’s letters cheered me up.

  When she arrived back in Montreat, she was overjoyed when Gigi greeted her with “Mama! Mama!” But Ruth quickly found out that Gigi was calling any young woman “Mama” and any young man “Daddy.”

  I was very worried at that time about our finances: we were down almost to our last dollar. I wrote a letter to industrialist R. G. LeTourneau. He was the only wealthy man I knew in America who might give us consideration. I told him our predicament, adding that it would take $7,000 to finish the job. Two weeks later, a letter came from him with a cashier’s check for exactly that amount.

  In Birmingham for a series of meetings, some of us stayed at the home of the Eric Hutchings family. Cliff and Billie Barrows were guests of Mr. and Mrs. A.G.B. Owen, wonderful Christians. Mr. Owen was wealthy, best known for the fast automobiles he built; the two couples became close friends.

  R. G. LeTourneau himself came to one of our meetings. He had built a factory near Newcastle to produce earth-moving equipment for Britain’s postwar rebuilding process. He had sent his brother-in-law, a preacher, to scout the initial prospects. On that brother’s advice, the plant was built, and apparently it wasn’t a success. LeTourneau had come to see for himself.

  By airmail Ruth sent some vitamin and mineral pills her father had had specially prepared for me. “Now, darling,” she admonished me, “please—for a change—do what the doctor says.”

  Ruth was bothered also by something not completely unrelated to the illness I was battling when she left. She thought I was unwise to push myself so hard in the Lord’s service. “I think sometimes it is easier to drive ourselves to actual death than it is to take ourselves firmly in hand and make ourselves do the wise thing,” she wrote from home. “Without sounding funny, it is better to rest awhile above the earth than to rest forever beneath it.” Then her theology came to her rescue. “While we do not expect to rest forever beneath it, so far as your present usefulness would be concerned, yo
u may as well be.”

  I wrote to her, of course, but before she received my answering letter, she wrote me another. That one really caught me off-guard. It was about our marriage. Her intuition told her that I was feeling guilty and that I was worried there might be an estrangement between us, caused by my obsession with the ministry and my repeated absences.

  “In your thinking we have grown apart due to the wide separation of our ways and interests,” she wrote. “But I feel closer to you than ever before. . . . Wherever you are, I go with you in mind and heart—praying for you continually. You, with your broader sphere of service, your worldwide circle of friends, your unlimited interests and responsibilities, would find it more difficult to be with me in mind and heart and prayers. . . . Don’t judge my heart-following of all your goings and comings by your interest in and understanding of my two-by-four world. And since my body was able to follow my heart for two months, the world you travel will seem much more personal and real to me. Your problems, thrills, heartaches, and glorious victories—much more my very own. . . . Take good care of your precious self. There is so much yet to be done for God, and so much love yet unexplored and unexperienced for us.” She was right—and more than that, I marveled at her sensitivity and insight.

  Ruth had been writing poetry since her girlhood in China. I am not sure when she wrote this poem, but people can read between the lines to understand how heartfelt were those convictions she expressed to me in her letter.

  Love

  without clinging;

  cry—

  if you must—

  but privately cry;

  the heart will adjust

  to the newness of loving

  in practical ways:

  cleaning

  and cooking

  and sorting out clothes,

  all say, “I love you,”

  when lovingly done.