Evangelist Billy Graham leaves the White House
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Answer to a Prayer. A few months later Billy was ordained a minister by the St. Johns Baptist Association of Northern Florida. He went on to preach "at every cowpath and wagon track in Florida." gained a strong voice, expanded confidence and got a scholarship to Wheaton College near Chicago. There he collected an A.B. in anthropology, an unusual major for a man who still rejects the theory of evolution.
The most important thing he did at Wheaton was to court his future wife, Ruth McCue Bell, a pretty, vivacious China missionary's daughter (Emily Cavanaugh had in the meantime married her Harvard man). Said he in a recent sermon: "I tell you ... the first time I kissed [my wife], I don't know whether she had any emotion, but I sure did. And when you fall in love with Jesus, you are. going to feel it ... Now if I had married all the girls ... I wanted to marry, the Lord only knows where I would have been tonight. The Lord gave me the grace and the strength and the courage to wait . . . And after eleven years, we are still sweethearts. And it's been heaven."
As for Ruth Bell, Billy himself seemed to be the answer to a prayer—one she had written before she met him:
"Dear God," I prayed—all unafraid (As girls are wont to be) "I do not want a handsome man— But let him be like Thee; I do not need one big and strong, Nor one so very tall, Nor need he be some genius, Or wealthy, Lord, at all; . . . (But) let his face have character— A ruggedness of soul, And let his whole life show, dear God, A singleness of goal . . ."
Assist from a Gangster. Billy Graham surely showed a singleness of goal. In 1943, he toyed with the idea of joining up as a G.I., decided against it, instead volunteered for the chaplains' corps. Later he withdrew from the corps, saw no war service at all (as a minister he was draft exempt). After a year as pastor of a small basement church in Western Springs, Ill. (the active congregation more than doubled while Billy was there), he joined an organization called "Youth for Christ," founded in Chicago to combat delinquency among teenagers. As a Youth-for-Christer, Billy traveled all over the U.S. and the world, preaching in a different town every day. In 1946, the aging president of a small college (Northwestern Schools in Minneapolis) announced he thought it was God's will that Graham be his successor. Graham, who thought the job would sidetrack him, replied tartly: "If the Lord has called me to do this, why doesn't He tell us both, instead of just you?"
But he took the job, for two years. By 1947, he struck out as an independent evangelist with a week's campaign in Grand Rapids, Mich., but it was not until his Los Angeles crusade in the fall of 1949 that he really got going. Then a cowboy singer and a gangster helped make him famous.