A Presidential Passage

Trust in the LORD with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.

Proverbs 3:5-6

For three days in August of 1974, Richard Nixon considered whether or not to leave the presidency willingly, or to go through impeachment. Meanwhile, Gerald Ford, serving as a nonelected vice president for the nine months since Spiro Agnew resigned, realized he would not be moving into the vice president’s house as vice president after all, but into the White House, as president—the first and still the only president not elected to either office.

Ford and his wife, Betty, never expected to be in that position under any circumstances, but certainly not in the ones that faced them at the time. Not only would Ford be assuming that awesome responsibility on August 9; he would be doing so at a time when the country was in chaos. Economic instability, the Vietnam War, and now impeachment seriously strained the goodwill between the nation and the White House.

“There had never been a time in our lives when we so much needed a source of strength beyond ourselves,” Betty says in Marlo Thomas’s book The Right Words at the Right Time. “Jerry reminded me of the fifth and sixth verses of chapter three of the Book of Proverbs, a prayer he learned as a boy, which reads: ‘Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct thy paths.’ This became our prayer.”^a

Betty Ford says that depending on God helped her through many challenges the Fords faced during their White House years. Besides those associated with her husband’s position, there were the challenges of her breast cancer and later her recovery from addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. She says that those verses were “a great source of strength for me.” Betty Ford, an Episcopalian, had always looked to God, but as she endured one difficult challenge after another, her dependence on God grew.

People usually learn to lean on God the best when times are tough. As marriage counselors we’ve talked with so many couples who confess that a crisis is what brought them back to a radical dependence on God—and we know just what they mean. In a recent medical emergency with one of our sons, we did nothing if not trust in the Lord with our whole hearts.

Maybe it’s because God seems more present in our desperate pain and grief. Or maybe it has more to do with the times we feel most out of control. But don’t wait for that kind of situation to strike you: seek to “acknowledge him” in all your ways today.

You never know what you can do until you have to do it.

—Betty Ford

^a 84

From the book