(4 of 10)
Between 1978 and 1995 Franklin built the tiny organization, called Samaritan's Purse, into a $32 million-a-year operation providing food, medicine and other aid in global crisis zones, while preaching the gospel to its beneficiaries and anyone else in the area. With Franklin--often literally--in the cockpit, Samaritan's Purse parachuted into places like Bosnia, Haiti, Ethiopia and, immediately after the bombing, Oklahoma City. The second half of Graham's autobiography, Rebel with a Cause, recounts with obvious relish various acts of charitable and evangelical derring-do, from dodging P.L.O. cannon fire while aiding an evangelical church in Beirut to training chaplains for the right-wing contra insurrection during the Nicaraguan civil war to jockeying a disabled plane into a remote village in Turkey. "I got it both ways," he once told GQ magazine. "When I die I'll go immediately to the presence of God, and yet in life I had a blast." Samaritan's Purse, like a few similar organizations, has been criticized in the foreign-aid community for evangelizing in situations when lifesaving should have been paramount. (General Norman Schwarzkopf has also sniped in print about Franklin's insistence on sending thousands of Arabic-language New Testaments into Saudi Arabia while the general was trying hard to honor Islamic sensibilities during Operation Desert Storm.) But in hot spots like the Rwandan capital of Kigali, the outfit's reputation is solid.
The Lord had not clobbered Franklin for being what he was; he had not handcuffed him. Instead he had set him free. He had taken the very daredevil traits that Franklin thought he had developed to spite him and had turned them to his own good ends. Not only that, but he had arranged for Franklin to achieve the elusive goal of every great man's son: to find his own place in the world. Billy Graham was the world's best preacher, but he had never piloted a six-seater in search of savable souls nor had an evangelically sound reason for carrying a .38 in an ankle holster. If this had been Franklin Graham's only and final job, he could have happily left it at that. But it was not his only and final job.
The "invitation" is the soul of a revival meeting. All that precedes it is aimed at the moment when the preacher asks the audience to "come forward" and accept Jesus. It is the event's punch line, its consummation: if a preacher is a salesman, it is the clinching handshake; if he is a fisherman, it is the taking in of the net. Billy Graham's nets were always filled to breaking. In 1983 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Franklin Graham's net was empty.