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Ruth Bell Graham
Keep Looking Forward
By age twelve, Ruth Bell knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. She dreamed of becoming a missionary—an unmarried missionary in Tibet, to be exact. The plan was not unrealistic. Born to medical missionaries and raised in Qingjiang, Jiangsu, China, Ruth was more than familiar with the rigors and dangers of missionary life. Her father was a surgeon and superintendent of the 170-bed Presbyterian Hospital, three hundred miles north of Shanghai. Her mother, in addition to her domestic duties, worked in the women’s clinic. Ruth recalled many nights when she lay rigid in bed, listening to gunshots echoing just outside the compound’s walls. It was a precarious existence in which death was a very real threat, yet in spite of the risks, Ruth was determined to dedicate her life to Christ as a foreign missionary, and an unmarried one at that. What she did not anticipate was that God had other, very different plans for her.
“I’ll Do the Leading, and You’ll Do the Following”
At age thirteen Ruth was sent from China to boarding school in North Korea, after which she returned to the United States and enrolled in Wheaton College in Chicago. It was there that Ruth met Billy Graham, whom she described in letters to her parents as a “real inspiration” and “a man of one purpose [that] controls his whole heart and life.”1 Ruth was immediately smitten, and the feeling was mutual. But there was a problem. While Ruth was still determined to follow her calling as a missionary, Billy was firm. He knew his calling was as an evangelistic minister, not a missionary. He drew the line in the sand: Ruth could choose him or missionary work—the decision was hers to work out with God.
Ruth grappled with her decision for several months. While she admitted to both Billy and herself that she loved him and could not imagine life without him, she could not quell the apprehension she felt about marrying him. At one point she wrote to her parents that she believed the relationship was “of the Lord,” but at the same time she expressed her deepest concerns in her journal. “If I marry Bill I must marry him with my eyes open,” she wrote. “He will be increasingly burdened for lost souls and increasingly active in the Lord’s work. After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights—and his forever, I will slip into the background. . . . In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill’s.”2
Ruth continued to waffle even after the official engagement was announced. When she returned to Wheaton in January 1942, Billy asked if she wished to give the ring back to him. She didn’t, she admitted, but she also couldn’t quite abandon the idea that she was meant to be a missionary. Billy, never one for subtleties, laid out the issue clearly for her, saying, “Listen, do you or do you not think the Lord brought us together?” Ruth could not argue with that; she knew God had ordained their partnership. Then the answer for Billy was simple: “I’ll do the leading, and you’ll do the following.”3 The decision was made. Ruth followed Billy, and from that moment on, she never looked back.
Nineteen months later, on August 13, 1943, Ruth Bell and Billy Graham were married before 250 guests at Montreat Presbyterian Church in North Carolina. Although she was always candid about the challenges of living in the public sphere as the wife of a world-famous evangelist, she never wrote or spoke with regret about her decision to abandon missionary work in favor of marrying Billy Graham. “Make the least of all that goes and the most of all that comes,” she said more than once during her lifetime. “And keep looking forward. Don’t look backwards.”4
The Goodbyes Come Like a Small Death
Just a few days after their honeymoon, Ruth got a sneak peek at her future. Although she was ill with a high fever, Billy didn’t cancel his previously scheduled preaching engagement. Instead, he checked his wife into the local hospital before leaving town and sent her a telegram and a box of candy from the road. This would be the first of many occasions that Ruth, who would come to be known as the “Revival Widow” by the press, would be relegated to second priority.
Not only did she wrestle with feelings of abandonment and loneliness while Billy was on the road, she also struggled to deal with her husband’s increasing fame and the spotlight that was constantly fixed on her and their children. By 1954 the family was continuously hounded by the media and the public. Tourists would drive through their Montreat neighborhood, slow in front of the Grahams’ house to snap pictures, and dash across the front yard in search of souvenirs—a twig, a stone, a splinter from the rustic gate. Fans lined up by the dozen for Billy’s autograph at the airport and in restaurants. Ruth especially was scrutinized by the press, from her makeup to her clothing and jewelry to the brand of her shoes. “It’s an odd kind of cross to bear,” she reflected in her journal. “Yet those who have not been through it would consider it some kind of glory.”5
Ruth never got used to the limelight, and she never enjoyed it. Often at her husband’s crusades she would slip quietly into the crowd to find a seat in the back of the stadium or up high near the rafters. She was always eager to escape the fans and the flashbulbs and whenever possible would flee to her hotel room with her worn leather Bible in hand. She turned to the Bible and to her own writing for solace and would often pour her true feelings, anxieties, and sorrows into her journal. In fact, Ruth published more than a dozen books of her own, including several volumes of poetry, personal reflections, and stories for children. It’s in these very personal accounts that Ruth reveals her heart:
We live a time
secure;
sure
It cannot last
for long
then
the goodbyes come
again again
like a small death,
the closing of a door.
One learns to live
with pain.
One looks ahead,
not back,
. . . never back,
only before.
And joy will come again
warm and secure,
if only for the now,
laughing,
we endure.6
Although Ruth never intended her poems or personal reflections for publication, her writing is particularly valuable in that it allows us an intimate glimpse of her more pensive, vulnerable side. While these writings offer us insight into her ongoing struggles, they also illustrate how much Ruth relied on God, his Word, and prayer to carry her through the most troubling times. Her prayerful and meditative writing was also a powerful antidote against the pervasive loneliness and isolation. “Sometimes I wrote to capture a moment or reflect on a thought. Sometimes I wrote because I had to. It was write or develop an ulcer. I chose to write,” she admitted.7
Billy was on the road more than six months out of the year, often for a month or longer at a time. Yet according to their five children, Ruth never displayed her loneliness or sorrow. Her oldest daughter, GiGi, speculated that maybe Ruth cried behind closed doors, but she never saw it. She remembers only the fact that her mother kept the children busy and never complained about their father’s absence. Anne, the Grahams’ secondborn, remembered always seeing her mother’s bedroom light on, no matter how late at night. “She’d be studying her Bible,” Anne recalled. “That’s how Mother coped with Daddy’s being gone so much.”8
Ministering to the Individual
Ruth may have kept a low profile compared to her world-famous husband, but she ministered to many lost souls in her own right. When Ruth traveled with Billy during his early crusades, she often struggled to discern her role. During the 1954 London crusade, for instance, Ruth hung in the shadows, wanting to help but anxious and lacking confidence. Frustrated, she wrote in her journal, “I don’t know where one single contact I have made over here has resulted in one single conversion to Christ.”9 As the years passed, though, Ruth gained confidence and began to discover her own niche in ministry. Unlike her husband, who preached to thousands, Ruth thrived in ministering to a single individual at a time. She didn’t fear or shy from people’s problems, no matter how ugly. Instead, she befriended the outcasts—drug addicts, criminals, and prisoners—and spent hours conversing with and counseling them.
Ruth visited one such criminal, Marvin King, who was imprisoned for second-degree murder in the state prison of southern Michigan. Although he struggled to forgive himself for his crime, he was comforted by her warmth and compassion. “Ruth was a woman God chose to use in keeping the candle of hope and love burning when fate had plunged me into the abyss of guilt and despair,” he said later, after he’d been granted early parole.10 She also befriended Carol, a twenty-year-old convicted murderer who was serving a sixty-year sentence in Raleigh’s Correction Center for Women. “I had a lot of people that tried to get in the jail to see me, the more or less want-to-save-your-soul type people,” Carol told Ruth’s biographer, Patricia Cornwell. “I was hearing so much of how I was being damned and going to hell. But Ruth wasn’t like that. She wasn’t judgmental. She didn’t try to push me.”11
Likewise, Ruth refused to shun even the most scandalized celebrity. In 1994, when the televangelist Jim Bakker was released from prison, she invited him to sit with her in church the first Sunday he was out of jail, and she called the Asheville newspaper and warned them not to send a reporter to church.
Ruth fulfilled a similar role as trusted advisor and counselor for her husband, much to the irritation of some of his paid staff members. It was no secret that Ruth and her father, Dr. Bell, were the two people Billy sought first for personal, leadership, and business advice. He didn’t necessarily heed their advice, but he listened. For instance, Ruth was adamantly opposed to Billy’s involvement in politics, and she repeatedly made her opinions on the matter clear. At one point, as they dined with President Lyndon Johnson and Lady Bird Johnson at the Democratic convention in 1964, the president asked Billy for advice about who he should choose as his running mate. Before he could respond, Ruth kicked her husband under the table—to remind him, “You are supposed to limit your advice to moral and spiritual issues.”12
Not Just Tibet, but Everywhere
Ruth Bell Graham was content to stand in the shadows and let her husband take the stage. Her primary job, and one she did exceedingly well, was to raise their five children, shield them from the glaring spotlight, and support her husband in his worldwide ministry. Despite her calm, steady, and consistent demeanor, we know from her candid personal reflections that Ruth struggled in this role throughout her entire life. She sacrificed much in marrying a world-famous evangelist—not only her dreams and ambitions of serving as a missionary in Tibet but also her privacy and desire for a normal family life.
Yet a closer look at her subtle but important role reveals an interesting insight. Perhaps Ruth did not stray as far from her original ambition as it might seem. As Cornwell noted, Ruth’s life evolved in a way she could have never imagined back when she was a Wheaton student, but her priorities never wavered. Ruth Bell Graham ministered primarily to one, but in doing so she ministered to the world.