My child arrived just the other day, he came to the world in the usual way. But there were planes to catch and bills to pay. He learned to walk while I was away. And he was talking ‘fore I knew it, and as he grew, he’d say, ‘I’m gonna be like you, Dad. You know I’m gonna be like you.’”
— “Cat’s in the Cradle,” Harry Chapin
Billy Graham tried to save the world, traveling for months at a time to more than 170 countries to preach the gospel to tens of millions he considered lost. After one extended trip, it took him awhile to recognize one of his sons when he returned home.
When the ambitious son of this ambitious father grew up, he would carve out his own place in the evangelical world, leaving his children behind while he repaired homes in the Bosnian village of Hadzicido and drove around mined potholes in Angola to bring medicine to a remote hospital. Eventually, he would take the crusade stage dominated by his father for more than half a century.
Billy Graham. Franklin Graham. America’s preacher and the rebellious son who would defy all odds to take his place at the head of the world’s most powerful evangelism organization.
Two men more alike than either ever realized. Until now.
The prodigal son has returned home. This year, Franklin became president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. When his father dies, he will try to do what no modern-day evangelist’s son has done before him and take his father’s place on the public stage.
Recapturing time
Until then, the two men who made tremendous personal sacrifices for their ministries will spend as much time together as possible. The fiery preacher who once was certain the End was near and the son who was a teen rebel now have more modest goals: to love each other as best they can in the time they have left. And let God worry about the rest.
“Life is short,” says Franklin Graham.
“Cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon. ‘When you comin’ home, Dad?’ ‘I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then, Son. You know we’ll have a good time then.”
Billy Graham has preached to kings and presidents, standing alone in national polls for more than four decades on the list of America’s most admired men. He has been at the vanguard of technological revolutions allowing evangelists to reach hundreds of millions of people, and his integrity-guided television evangelism through one of its roughest periods in the late 1980s with the Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals.
But like other Christian evangelists before him, going back to the early Christians Peter and Paul, such service has come at a great personal price. Ask Billy Graham what he regrets about his lifestyle, and his response has been consistent in his later years: the time away from his family. He preached to others what he could not practice himself: the need for fathers to spend time with their children.
On one trip home in the summer of 1960, he writes in his autobiography, it took him several minutes to realize “that the beautiful little child wandering out to greet us” after a long trip was his younger son, Ned.
For his elder son, Franklin, expectations were great. Shortly after he was born, well-wishers sent letters urging him to “grow up fast” to follow in his father’s footsteps.
But growing up without a father at home much of his life, Franklin Graham chafed at the idea of being not only a preacher’s kid, but America’s preacher’s kid.
He had other plans. He would sometimes skip church to ride his dirt bike when his father was away from home. As he got older, he became a teen rebel who smoked and drank and fought. He led police on high-speed chases and was kicked out of LeTourneau College in Longview, Texas, after his father had used his influence to get him in.
On Franklin Graham’s 22nd birthday, Billy Graham confronted his son and told him to make a choice: Either accept or reject Jesus Christ. A resentful son left shortly afterward on a tour of the Holy Land.
Two weeks later, smoking a cigarette in a hotel room in Jerusalem, the younger Graham picked up a Bible, got on his knees and experienced a religious conversion. “The rebel had found the cause,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography, “Rebel With a Cause: Finally Comfortable Being Graham.”
“And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon, little boy blue and the man in the moon. ‘When you coming home, Son?’ ‘I don’t know when. But we’ll get together then, Dad. You know we’ll have a good time then.”
Like his father, Franklin would set up home in North Carolina but often be away from his four children.
In 1979, he became president of Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization that ministers to victims of war, disease, natural disaster and poverty in more than 100 countries. His travels have taken him to places such as Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Honduras and Lebanon.
It was a way he could excel in a ministry separate from his father. But by the early 1980s, he was ready to try to become an evangelist on his own. His first effort, in 1983, was a bust. Hundreds and thousands typically respond to his father’s invitations, but no one came forward that day in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to publicly accept Jesus.
But he did not give up. Honing his skills before larger and larger audiences, with a name and striking physical resemblance to his father that can draw crowds, he has become an accomplished evangelist on his own. Since 1989, he has preached before millions throughout the world. In March, more than 150,000 attended his crusade in El Salvador.
Whom does he pattern himself after?
“I think my father has probably had the greatest influence, not that you consciously try to copy,” he says.
Franklin does have those piercing eyes, the famous expressive face, and his father’s unpretentious sincerity in greeting other people.
However, he is not as much of a natural evangelist. “When I stand up in the pulpit, am I scared? Yes, it’s a lonely place,” Franklin said.
Still, as he gains confidence and polish as an evangelist, his star continues to rise. In 2001, he gave the prayer at the inauguration of another prodigal son, George W. Bush.
What he had not counted on, he said, was how meaningful the Harry Chapin song “Cat’s in the Cradle” would be in his own life.
Like his father, he said during an interview at the organization’s crusade last month in Cincinnati, “I’m having those regrets, too.”
Understanding the role
When your kids are 5, 6, 7, 8, he said, it seems like they will be around forever. But now having just turned 50, when his own kids tell him they’re busy when he calls them, he said he has come to a greater understanding of the sacrifices made by him and his father.
“It seems like you blink, and they’re off to college,” he said. “And you blink one more time and they’re married.”
“And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me. He’d grown up just like me. My boy was just like me.”
The song “Cat’s in the Cradle” ends with a father and son set apart by the paths they have chosen.
But that is not the ending the Grahams have chosen.
At age 83, and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Billy Graham finally appears ready to bow out of public ministry. His last scheduled crusade will be in October in Dallas, and his spokesman says he will spend time after that caring for his wife, Ruth, and himself.
His son, Franklin, who was named his successor in 1995, is taking much of the burden off his father. In 2000, Franklin was named chief executive officer of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, and earlier this year he was named its president.
“His son is fine, but I can’t think of a great world leader whose son has even been able to fully follow in his father’s footsteps,” said the Rev. Lee Hopkins of Bellevue, Ky., as he sat in the stands during the recent Billy Graham Crusade in Cincinnati. “Someone else will rise up to meet the needs of that day. God knows who that is.”
It is a legacy the son agrees can be passed on only by God.
Just as his father is finally realizing his mortality, so, too, has Franklin made the decision that he can never be the next Billy Graham.
“My father never applied for this job,” Franklin said. “I can take the mantle of leadership for that organization. But to take and fill his shoes, I can’t do that. No one can do that.”
What he can do, in a way neither was able to during Franklin’s growing-up years, is see that he and his father spend as much time together as possible.
Each week, when he is at his home in North Carolina, he has lunch with his father.
A family that has paid the price of sacrificing time together for ministry is determined this story won’t end in the bittersweet refrain of the Chapin song, but will resemble that found in another famous work, the children’s book “I Love You Forever.” The parent cradling the baby in the beginning of the book is in the end held in the grown son’s arms.
“Right now, my focus is on my father,” the younger Graham said. “I want to help my father finish well.” (RNS)
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