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It was a symbolic, petit-mal rebellion, negligible in the context of the 1960s. (Or the '90s: writer Pat Jordan once described Franklin as "a nice man dressing to look bad.") But in the moral universe of serious Evangelicalism, it signified something more troubling: a distance from God, or worse, a willful turning away from his face. That is certainly how Franklin understood it. "I prayed and attended church," he says. "But I found the things in the world pleasurable and fun, and I didn't like being around Christian people." He had come to identify full Christian commitment with hated authority: "I was afraid if I surrendered my life to Christ I'd have, like, spiritual handcuffs on me. I had this picture of this God in heaven who had, like, a big stick, and if I surrendered my life, he'd just wait for me to go to the left or right and clobber me." At the same time, he yearned: "Something was missing. There was that emptiness you can't explain. There wasn't that joy; there wasn't that fulfillment."
His spiritual crisis, like that of many others, was resolved through Billy Graham. Billy and Ruth had not been overbearing about Franklin's religious life, but on his 22nd birthday in 1974, he recalls, his father confronted him, saying "You can't continue to play the middle ground. Either you're going to choose to follow and obey him or reject him." Feeling resentful, Franklin left shortly afterward to assist a Graham friend with a tour of the Holy Land. But several days later, in a hotel room in Jerusalem, he reread what might be called the New Testament's great amnesty clause, Romans 8: 1: "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Then, as Franklin writes, "I put my cigarette out and got down on my knees beside my bed. I was his...The rebel had found the cause." Now all he needed was a job.
A month after Franklin was born again, a Graham friend named Bob Pierce who ran an international-aid mission invited him on a remarkable two-month tour of the Far East that included China, Indonesia and India, with its "hundreds of millions of people," as Franklin writes, "locked in the darkness of Hinduism...bound by Satan's power." The combination of small planes and benighted heathens proved irresistible to a man whose maternal grandparents had been missionaries to China. Pierce died of leukemia three years later, and Franklin, who by then had graduated from college, married and become a father, took over the mission.