Something Big Happened

Something Big Happened

It was love at first sight.

RUTH BELL could never quite remember the first time she met Billy Graham, but for Billy it was love at first sight.

One day in 1940 as Billy and a friend were driving through the streets of Wheaton, Illinois, talking about their girlfriends, Billy’s friend told him he thought Ruth was beautiful. “She’s the second nicest girl on campus, the nicest being my girl, of course.”

The “second nicest girl” was the twenty-year-old daughter of Presbyterian missionaries to China. Ruth was studying to be a missionary as well. Billy, already an ordained Baptist minister at twenty-one, was also a student at Wheaton and felt called to be an evangelist.

Their first meeting in November was unremarkable for Ruth, but Billy remembered everything about it—the hallway, the friends she was chatting with, her slight smile. “I fell in love right that minute,” he later told her, reconstructing the moment she could not remember.

A month later Billy mustered his courage and asked her out on their first date, a concert performance of Handel’s Messiah. That night Billy made a more lasting impression. Ruth returned to her rooming house and wrote in her diary, “Bill is a real inspiration—because, I suppose, he is a man of one purpose & that one purpose controls his whole heart & life. He is dead in earnest yet richly endowed with the fruit of the Spirit. . . . Humble, thoughtful, unpretentious, courteous.”

Then she closed her diary, knelt beside the bed, and prayed, “God, if you let me serve You with that man, I’d consider it the greatest privilege of my life.”

Billy had already written home to his parents that Ruth was the girl he intended to marry. But his friends cautioned him to dampen his enthusiasm for Ruth lest he scare her away. So for the next six weeks Billy avoided her altogether. Ruth finally took matters into her own hands and invited him to a house party. Billy issued a counter-invitation: to come hear him preach in Chicago that same night, Friday, February 7, 1941.

That second date was unconventional. Ruth sat in a pew while Billy preached. “The authority with which he spoke,” she later mused in her journal, “the humility, the fearlessness. . . . The star, seen and admired from afar became a human, personal thing, within reach.”

Billy drove Ruth home, walked her to her door, said good night, and then hesitated. “There’s something I’d like you to make a matter of definite prayer,” he said. Ruth remembered even the cloud of breath that hung in the cold air between them. “I have been taking you out because I am more than interested in you and have been since the day we were introduced last fall. But I know you have been called to the mission field, and I’m not definite.”

Truth be told, Billy felt a clear call to evangelism. But he later revealed that at that moment he was so in love with her that the most he could make himself admit was that he did not feel definitely called to foreign missions.

Ruth was smitten. That night she couldn’t sleep and ended a dreamy journal entry with the thought, “Something big has happened.”

In spite of their mutual love, Ruth wrestled with the thought of giving up missions to be the wife of an evangelist, foreseeing many more evenings like their second date, alone in the pew or at home while Billy preached. But as they prayed, God showed them that they were called to each other, and two and a half years later, Ruth Bell became Mrs. Billy Graham.

Reflection

Have you ever felt “something big” happening in your life? When you do, look to God for his direction and his answer. God is just as interested in your life choices as he is in the lives of Ruth and Billy Graham.

Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. May your gracious Spirit lead me forward on a firm footing.

Psalm 143:10