6
Youth for Christ
The United States, Canada, Great Britain, Europe 1945–1947

At the end of 1944, when I was still recovering from the aftereffects of mumps, Torrey Johnson took me fishing off the Florida coast. I was looking forward to a relaxing day in the sun, but once we were on the ocean, he launched into an idea that had been boiling inside him for weeks. The early success of Chicagoland Youth for Christ had awakened in him a dream he could hardly contain.

During the war, he argued, servicemen and -women on weekend leave from their bases often went for a fling in nearby cities. Many Christians wanted to give them an alternative to the taverns and honky-tonks. They organized Saturday night youth rallies in several cities, quite independent of each other, that drew large crowds. Snappy Gospel music, interesting testimonies, and (most of all) short, youth-oriented sermons combined to attract thousands of lonely, insecure, and frightened teenagers and young adults. While still at Western Springs, I had spoken at several such youth rallies. From Torrey’s point of view, the big one had been in Chicago, where I was the first speaker in Orchestra Hall.

As we sat bobbing in the boat, Torrey began selling me on his blueprint for evangelism—and my part in it. He wanted to help organize youth rallies throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually the world. He planned to call the movement Youth for Christ International. He would get his Midwest Bible Church in Chicago to let him work half-time; the other half he would spend raising money to open a YFC office downtown. I almost immediately agreed with him that this plan was of God.

“But you’ll need more money than that,” I said.

“I’ll leave that to Bill Erny,” he replied confidently. “He’ll get it done.”

Bill Erny was a businessman who knew about money. He was also the only one who could talk straight to Torrey, giving him advice and counsel and saying no to him when necessary.

But how could I say yes to Torrey? In an informal way, independent YFC groups were already flourishing. Roger Malsbary had charge of the group in Indianapolis; Walter Smyth was coordinating in Philadelphia; George Wilson was responsible in Minneapolis; and Jack Wyrtzen handled New York—you could hear him on the radio, opening with the words, “From Times Square . . .”

But there was no real coordination among these groups, said Torrey. They had sprung up independent of each other and were only loosely connected. What he wanted to do was bring them all together to form a national organization, with perhaps twenty-five to fifty organizational components. “I think you’re the man to be our first full-time employee,” he said. “Would you pray about becoming our national—and international—organizer?”

I was learning to trust God for every step of my life. I generally prayed about everything, but it seemed unnecessary to pray about this opportunity! My strength was returning, and I was ready to travel, ready to preach, ready to evangelize. I wouldn’t be much of an organizer or paperwork man, I told Torrey, but I could not hide my enthusiasm. It was all I talked about with Ruth for the next several weeks. Finally, we decided that I should take the job.

But what would I do about my year-old pastorate? And what about my pending chaplaincy? Having seen my ministry expanding, the board of deacons at Western Springs graciously (and a few of them joyfully) accepted my resignation. The Army’s chief of chaplains granted me a discharge, since the end of the war seemed in sight, agreeing with my logic that I could make a far greater contribution to the spiritual well-being of servicepeople by organizing and preaching at youth rallies than I could serving as a chaplain.

And so it was, in January of 1945, that I walked into the first-ever office of YFC in Chicago, on Wells Street in the Loop. I felt excited and exhilarated: this was where I belonged, and I could not wait to get started. But the office was a sorry excuse for corporate headquarters—a couple of bare rooms alongside the elevated train tracks, furnished with boxes. Maybe there was even a chair.

With me was Amy Anderson, Torrey’s longtime secretary. One day early on she came to the door of my office. “There are two people here from Jackson, Mississippi: Dr. and Mrs. Overton,” she told me. In they came.

“We want to start a youth meeting in our town. Would you come help us?” they asked.

I didn’t have to think twice, because it was the only invitation I’d had. I said yes.

Of course, I felt no temptation to bask among those comforts of the Wells Street office. When more invitations came, as they soon did, I was glad to be out of town most of the time. Torrey worked from his office at the church. I was a traveling salesman again—not displaying a case of brushes this time, just brandishing my Bible.

At the beginning of 1945, in addition to Atlanta and Norfolk, I was preaching all over the Midwest. One day, as I was boarding a train with Al Smith, who was leading my singing, someone handed me a telegram from Chicago. I put it in my pocket, got onto the train, and was well on my way to Indianapolis before pulling it out. The doctor’s dire warnings about my possible inability to become a father were proved false: Ruth was expecting! I was elated at the news! I could hardly wait to get there so that I could send her a telegram and wire her some flowers.

Good as the news was, it meant we had to make some major changes. We were more in love with each other than ever, and the idea of living apart, even temporarily, caused me a lot of heartache. But working full-time with Youth for Christ would keep me on the road for more than half the time. Ruth did not want to stay alone in Chicago while I was away, especially now that she was pregnant, we agreed that she would be much better off among friends and family in familiar surroundings. We went back to North Carolina and moved in with her parents in the little, close-knit mountain community of Montreat. Her father was practicing medicine in nearby Asheville, and we were grateful she could be with them while I was on the road. Although we felt sure it was what the Lord was prompting us to do, we knew it was only a temporary, though happy, arrangement.

At that time, the military had priority on everything. To civilians like us, planes were available only on a standby basis. A very generous businessman, Mr. Walter Block of Kenosha, Wisconsin, gave an Air Travel Card to Torrey and one to me. As long as I was with YFC, I had that card and could charge a ticket to his account.

Sometimes I traveled by air, but mostly I went by Greyhound bus or by train. Because the railroads gave clergy of all denominations half-price tickets, I could take the Northwestern Railroad anywhere, have a bunk, and get some sleep for half of what the others were paying. I traveled across the country in those days, stopping in cities of all sizes.

Typical of the earliest YFC meetings was one in Atlanta’s City Auditorium on February 24, 1945, where I was introduced to the crowd of 5,000 as “the director of the Songs in the Night broadcast in Chicago.” I doubt if anyone in Atlanta had ever heard of the program. But with me on this night were a chalk artist, an Army major general, several servicemen who gave their Christian testimonies, and musicians galore—guitarist, pianist, soloist, sextet, trio, and the Salvation Army band! The press reported that this new movement, only a year old, was active in three hundred American cities.

For several months, Ruth was able to join me in various places. That made the traveling life more bearable. While we were in Atlanta, Ruth noticed a change in me.

“Every time we pass a ‘kiddie shop,’” she wrote to her parents, “Bill wants to stop and window-shop. He notices every little baby in sight now, and he used to ignore them completely. Guess I ought to write a book on Preacher Will Be a Papa.” (She had recently read the book entitled Papa Was a Preacher.)

As the months went by, Ruth grew bigger and bigger. She enjoyed shopping for maternity clothes. By June she could just squeeze into a size fourteen. From Pittsburgh, where I was preaching, she wrote home. She called my being with her “the nicest honeymoon we’ve had yet.”

“Bill has to speak only once a day, which makes it nice.” I hoped she meant nice for us to have time together, not nice that she had to listen to only one sermon a day!

In early July we were together in Ocean City, New Jersey, where I was preaching. We enjoyed some time sunning ourselves at the beach, but Ruth described her particular problem in a letter to her sister Rosa in Montreat: “Have the front of me toasted fairly nicely. But getting the other side is something else. A hard flat beach and I don’t fit face to face. Bill suggested I scoop out a hole for my tummy.”

That trip to Ocean City produced another amusing incident, as Ruth described in a hastily written letter to her parents: “When we first got there, we put some clothes in the cleaners with the promise we could get them in three days. The third day we were busy so we called for them the fourth. Found the place locked up and the man off on a two weeks’ vacation. So Monday morning before we left we called on the police and after half an hour of pleading, got them to go down and break in for us. There was much ringing of burglar alarms and looks of amazement from the shoppers (it being on the main street) and loss of dignity on the part of the cops who had to climb ladders, open transoms, shut off the alarm and glare at wisecrackers who’d stick their necks in at the door and warn the cops if they didn’t get out they’d have to call the police. But they were good sports and seemed to enjoy it. Found Bill’s jacket and my green mesh dress but no yellow coat anywhere. Left money with the assistant pastor to have it mailed when the wretched proprietor returns.”

On that same trip, we included a side excursion to New York City over the Fourth of July. Ruth noted that the Statue of Liberty looked as she expected, “only she was facing the wrong direction.” Harry Emerson Fosdick’s Riverside Church, a bastion of theological liberalism, was “impressive in a pagan sort of way”; it was devoid of any Christian symbol, even a cross.

Everywhere, through contact persons in various cities, I met with local pastors and lay leaders to form committees and plan rallies. In the first year, this took me from coast to coast (with plenty of places in between) and to most of the provinces of Canada, mostly by train. Additional preaching opportunities ranged from Moody Church in Chicago to Princeton Seminary in New Jersey.

Unfamiliar as I was with pregnancy timetables, I did not take Ruth all that seriously as she walked with me to the car on Septem-ber 21, 1945. She did not want me to make this trip. She wanted desperately for me to be with her when the baby came.

“Bill, the pains have already begun.”

“No, I don’t think so,” I replied confidently, as if I knew anything about labor.

“Yes, they have. The baby will be here soon!”

But I predicted it might take another two or three weeks. I kissed her good-bye and headed for a speaking engagement in Mobile, Alabama.

That evening, Virginia Leftwich Graham was born into the world, the daughter we would forever call Gigi and who enriched our lives immeasurably.

When I arrived home from Alabama and looked down at the baby in the bassinet that Ruth had trimmed with her wedding veil, I could only repeat over and over, “Hello, darling! Hello, precious!”

Proud parents that we were, we thought our daughter was perfect, from her shapely head to her pudgy toes. Her eyes were the largest Ruth had ever seen in a baby, and the way Gigi stared wide-eyed at her mother made Ruth think, This child has seen more, knows more, than I. If the poet Wordsworth was right about our arriving in this world with “intimations of immortality,” that was true in Gigi’s case.

When Gigi was a few months old, Ruth left her in the Bells’ care from time to time and came along with me to places from Minnesota to Massachusetts. It was nice for both of us, but it emotionally pulled Ruth in two directions at once.

EUROPE 1946–1947

In March and April of 1946, Torrey led a group of six men—me among them—to Great Britain and the Continent to launch YFC there. For most of us, it was our first trip abroad.

The trip over was something of a fiasco. The military-type DC–4 plane with bucket seats left out of Chicago in the morning. Hearst newspaperman Wesley Hartzell was with us, as was Stratton Shufelt, music director of Moody Church in Chicago. Charles Templeton—a Toronto YFC organizer and pastor of Toronto’s Avenue Road Church, one of the largest congregations in the city—was with us, and I remember how sick he got on the trip.

We stopped in Toronto and Montreal, and we were supposed to stop in Gander, Newfoundland. But as we neared Gander, the pilot announced over the loudspeaker system that because of a heavy snowstorm, we were going instead to a small U.S. airfield nearby.

Apparently thinking that the plane’s passengers were a vaudeville troupe, the social director at the military base hastily scheduled a late-night performance. Torrey didn’t tell him we were a Youth for Christ team! The audience in the packed theater whistled and cheered during the first part of the meeting as Chuck told stories. They roared at Strat Shufelt’s rendition of “Shortnin’ Bread.” But when Torrey appeared on the stage, they started to yell.

“Where are the girls?” I heard. “Show us the legs!”

When Strat sang again, they booed.

Backstage we had prayer, and then I had to go out and face them. I apologized for not being the entertainment they had expected and gave my testimony.

The base commander was furious and wanted to throw us in jail, but eventually we were able to resume our trip.

Meantime, in London, Gavin Hamilton had organized a group of evangelical pastors to greet us and listen to our talk on Youth for Christ work in America. But our plane, after being refueled at Shannon, Ireland, was diverted to Scotland because of bad weather over London. As a result, we had to travel down to London by train and arrived late for the meeting.

The pastors seemed patient, though, and they asked each one of us to give a talk. None of us had spoken to a British audience before. I had some advantage because the majority of them had some connection with the Plymouth Brethren; I had met with Brethren in Wheaton and knew their methods and terminology. So when I got up, I told them that Dr. H. A. Ironside, pastor of Moody Church in Chicago, had a saying: any real evangelical theologian always milked the Plymouth Brethren cow!

Among evangelicals in England, Dr. Ironside was well known as one of the great preachers in the world, though I don’t think he was ever ordained. He had been a Brethren and had been a missionary to the Native Americans in Arizona and New Mexico, and he knew the Bible better than anybody I think I ever met. I remember sitting beside him once at the Moody Church, where he was to speak at a Youth for Christ meeting. He went sound asleep and began to snore, and when it was his time to speak, I just nudged him with my elbow. He got up, opened the Bible, and spoke from the passage he had opened to at random. It was tremendous!

Alan Redpath, pastor of Duke Street Church in Richmond, a suburb of London, was impressed with my words and came up afterward to ask if I would preach for him on Sunday. I said I was happy to do it.

To rest after the long plane ride, we spent several nights at Hildenborough Hall, run by Tom Rees, Britain’s leading evangelist. He and his wife, Jean, had developed the Hall as a large conference building for young people. The speaker that particular evening was Stephen Olford, and we were invited to attend the meetings and to each give a word.

Chuck Templeton and I went around together all the time on that trip; we roomed together and had a lot of fun, becoming real pals. A Canadian, he impressed us all with his knowledge of the history and culture of places like Ireland.

The travels of Odysseus held no more wonders than ours for us, as we visited England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, and Norway. Everywhere we traveled, we were joined by local church leaders who contributed mightily not only to our success but also to our survival.

The whole city of London looked to us as if it had been destroyed. St. Paul’s Cathedral was still standing; so were the Houses of Parliament, although they had been bombed. The people were in a happy mood. The war was finished; no longer did the sirens wail, sending people hustling into the Underground. The British still ruled one-fifth of the world: India, Canada, and Australia were still being run by the Colonial Office.

We stayed mostly in homes and run-down hotels wherever we went.

To cover all the territory, we split up into teams, and this led to diverse adventures. We were there less than a year after the end of World War II, and we encountered shortages, hardships, and rationing everywhere. Food especially preoccupied us, as it did most people there. There was envy for the Dublin team, who enjoyed fruit juice and real coffee for breakfast, along with ham and eggs. Wes observed that the only eggs in London were in museums; in Britain, he added, “everything edible has become extinct, and cold plaster of paris has become an acceptable substitute for ice cream.” He and Torrey reveled in the huge smorgasbord featured on a Danish steamer.

The team visiting Stockholm and Oslo held sixteen meetings in four days, with crowds of up to 4,500 and a couple of thousand turned away. In Norway especially, where people were still recovering from the oppressive Nazi occupation, enthusiasm for YFC ran high.

During the first three weeks, I was in the group that toured Great Britain from one end to the other, holding three and four meetings a day, almost every one packed to capacity. We might be in a public hall on a Saturday night, in a fashionable church on a Sunday night, and in a moviehouse on a weekday night after the film. The people, still reeling from the war, were starved for hope and hungry for God.

After a whirlwind tour of Holland, Denmark, Belgium, and France with Chuck Templeton during the next three weeks, we finally headed home.

Right after we got back to the United States, we had a board meeting of Youth for Christ at a hotel in Swampscott, Mas-sachusetts. A scant two weeks after that, I preached at the first of a half-dozen rallies spread over the summer from Toronto to San Antonio, and from New Jersey to Oregon, as well as at a couple of youth conferences.

Gavin Hamilton urged me to come and hold campaigns in Great Britain. He would be glad to stay over there, he said, and set up the meetings. I felt in my heart that my future was in this type of evangelism. Torrey pointed out that it would cost a lot of money, however, and said I would have to raise it all myself.

I asked Ruth to leave our year-old daughter, Gigi, with the extended family of grandparents, aunts, and uncles in Montreat and join me as soon as she could. I asked Strat Shufelt if he would come with me as song leader, since he was well known in Britain. He was a handsome man with a lot of charisma, and he loved the Lord with all his heart. He and his wife, Marge, agreed to go with me; but two or three weeks before we were to leave, he called to say they just couldn’t leave their two little girls.

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 also 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, you 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.

So—

love

without clinging;

cry—

if you must—

but privately cry;

the heart will adjust

to the length of his stride,

the song he is singing,

the trail he must ride,

the tensions that make him

the man that he is,

the world he must face,

the life that is his.

So—

love

without clinging;

cry—

if you must—

but privately cry;

the heart will adjust

to being the heart,

not the forefront of life;

a part of himself,

not the object—

his wife.

So—

love!

I returned home from our European tour at the beginning of April 1947, having been gone for six months, knowing that Ruth and I had weathered the slight tension in our relationship. Those months had also been a time of spiritual challenge and growth. My contact with British evangelical leaders during this and subsequent trips, especially with Stephen Olford, deepened my personal spiritual life. I was beginning to understand that Jesus Himself was our victory, through the Holy Spirit’s power. I developed an even deeper hunger for Bible study and new biblical insights for my messages. I quoted the Bible more frequently than ever before.

At a YFC rally in Minneapolis, Minnesota, back in February 1945—only a month after I had joined Torrey Johnson’s new venture—a man heard me preach who was now about to change my life radically. And that, incidentally, would lead me into great confusion about a great many things.