Ruth Graham

James M Sandbrook

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Ruth Graham

I remember reading that Ruth saw Billy across campus and said to her friend, "Thats the man I am going to marry." and she hadn't even talked to him yet. And she did, she married him.
At a Crusade she was on the ground looking up at Billy who, onstage, was preaching, and the woman there on the ground with Ruth, they were staring adoringly up at Billy and the one next to her said something like, "Wouldn't you like to wake up with him in your bed each morning"" and Ruth replied something like, "Its wonderful!" to the woman's surprise, then she explained that Billy was her husband.

I also remember Billy in exasperation praying to God about, "...that woman you gave me..." as he was trying to understand Ruth and also their marriage, as well all do with each other and our own marriages from time to time, and that told me that Billy and Ruth were normal, like the rest of us in many ways.

I found this on the Internet when Ruth passed away and want to share it here.

My friend Ruth -- from 1943 until her death in June this year, the wife of Billy Graham -- was the first person ever to talk to me about heaven. As I put the book that eventually followed, All the Way to Heaven online this month, I keep thinking back to that conversation so many years ago. Ruth and I were sitting at the big round table in the eat-in kitchen of the Grahams' rustic home in Little Piney Cove, North Carolina, working on a book for children and discussing what understanding of spiritual matters a six-year-old might have.

"Heaven for instance," Ruth said. "What did that word mean to you when you were that age?"

I looked at her, puzzled. "I don't think it meant anything. I don't think I even knew it."

"But… when your minister talked about it, you must had some idea!"

I didn't have a minister, I told her; my family didn't go to church. It was Ruth's turn to stare. The daughter of missionaries, churchgoing had been the anchor of her young life. An invisible, ever-near other world was as real to her at age six, she said, as the furniture in her bedroom.

Ruth grew up in the rural China of the old warlord days, where the Christian community lived in a high-walled compound. Outside that compound was a world of very visible evil -- rich landlords and starving peasants, bribe-taking judges, legal torture, little girls sold into slavery. Within its walls, by contrast, were kindness, love, dignity. "They were microcosms of heaven and hell," Ruth said. "I had no trouble, at six, picturing either realm. Nor understanding that it was Jesus who made the difference."

The world I grew up in, on the other hand, I told her, revealed no such distinction between godly and ungodly. All the citizens of Scarsdale, New York, to a child's eyes anyway, were equally law-abiding. If some of them went to church, they seemed no different from the rest. "Heaven", when eventually I encountered the word, I pictured much as I did the Land of Oz, an imaginary place somewhere over the rainbow.

Ruth, though, knew from earliest childhood not only that heaven was real, but that it was a far happier world than this one. "My parents often talked to me about it. There'll be no suffering there, they said. No sorrow, no separation!"

When her own children came along, Ruth made sure they too learned early about this wondrous realm. I remember being at the Grahams' home once when a beloved dog died. When they got to heaven, the children asked their mother anxiously, would the dog be there? Instead of smiling at the naïve notion, Ruth went, as she always did when confronted with a question for the first time, to the Bible. Heaven, she concluded from her Scripture search, is where each of us will be totally happy. And if someone's happiness depends on finding a particular animal there, then yes, heaven might well house dogs -- horses, cats, canaries.

All of our life here on earth, Ruth believed, was a journey to our real, eternal home. Believing this didn't mean that her journey was an easy one; we get to know Jesus best, she often said, when the road is rough. In The Glory of Ruth (Guideposts, October, 2007) I write about one such rough road: Ruth's responsibility for raising five children virtually alone, with a husband away nine weeks out of ten.

Jesus, the Way -- "the one way" -- to heaven. The Way Ruth walked for 87 years. How often, since June, I've thought of my friend "totally happy" in the world I first glimpsed through her eyes of faith.

- Elizabeth Sherrill.

I think the world is a better place for Truth being here, she was certainly an inspiration to many, and she had an undying belief in God and that is an example that she leaves for the world to remember her buy and to realise that they too can be like this. The world needs more Ruth's.

All the best from

James M Sandbrook.

21st of February, 2021.

James M Sandbrook

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