Gigi Graham - Bringing America Back to Life 2015

first I just want to thank you all so much I thank Molly for even inviting me and I was very much challenged by what I heard today and you know I'll have to say though it was pretty heavy wasn't it it was pretty heavy a lot to think about and so tonight I thought you know Molly called me and she asked me if I would be willing to speak on the subject family a beautiful thing and I burst out laughing and I said never in a hundred years I said first of all you can't find it in the Bible and you sure can't find it in the Graham family so I said would you allow me to maybe make it a little bit lighter because I know we're going to have some heavy lectures today and I would like to make something a little lighter and so we talked about doing what I do sometimes if the cove is a family chatting basically when you leave here tonight you're going to know more about the Graham family than you ever wanted to know but so I just want to tell you that I am privileged to be here and to share with you a little bit about our family and as you will see God is gracious I like to tell people that you know people come up to me all the time and they say you know what a wonderful family you have and I say no you're wrong we are an ordinary family with a wonderful God that somehow chose our wonder you know ordinary family to do some wonderful things and so I'm very very thankful for His grace and for His mercy because we're definitely not perfect as you will see but anyway I want to invite you now to watch a family chat all right now I'm supposed to use this first okay there we go that's me one not cute my name is Gigi and I am the eldest in the Graham family and I get my name from the word dodge a dodge in Chinese means firstborn sister and my grandparents were missionaries in China and so I was the first born my parents in fact were told they would never have children daddy had had a very very bad case of the mumps when he and mother got married and the doctor told them to probably never expect to have children so they were pretty happy when they found out that I was on the way now you will see in a little while that you know mother said there was never a little girl that tried harder to be good and was so bad at it than I was so I think I sort of the apples don't fall far from the tree as you'll see from my mom she was a very feisty little lady but anyway that's where I got my name Gigi from my real name is Virginia but it's not short for Virginia it's from Dai J which is as I said a Chinese name those are my grandparents on my mama side and my grandfather and grandmother came from the valley of Virginia the Shenandoah Valley and my grandfather was a very very good baseball player in fact he was a pitcher and he was such a good pitcher that from what I understand his pitch is still used today but he was sold to a farm team for the Baltimore Orioles when the Lord just touched his heart about going to the mission field as a medical missionary and so he married his childhood sweetheart and he went back to medical school and he became a medical doctor and in by the time he was 23 he had his medical degree and he and my grandmother as a very young couple in 1916 went to China as missionaries now that was tough I went to China the first time in 1989 not long after mr. Nixon helped open the doors to China and I will tell you it was tough then but when my grandparents went there it was tough first of all it was a ten-year commitment it's not like our missionaries today which are short-term you know it's wonderful that we have Skype and we have Facebook and we have all these wonderful things of keeping in touch with our loved ones overseas whether in the military or mission or whatever but in those days they didn't have that it took weeks and weeks and weeks to get a letter or a package but they went trusting the Lord and you know what happened they fell in love with China they went to a mission that had been founded by dr. Simon Stricker dr. Simon Stricker was pearl Bucs father and so they went there and they fell in love with China and they fell in love with the Chinese people and they fell in love with the language and they learned the language in fact the first of December I was in China and I was privileged to be able to show a film of their our history of our family a love for China and when my grandfather was speaking Chinese the entire conference burst into applause because he had learned Chinese so well but they were there for 25 years and they stayed there through the Boxer Rebellion and they stay there through many of they lived in bandit country mother said she doesn't remember going to bed at night without hearing gunfire and it was a rough country little baby girls were thrown away and a mother would find us sometimes going to school there'd be a little bit dead baby on the side of the road and dogs eating it you know so this was not an easy time to live in China but they did love it they fell in love with it and were there for 25 years after the Japanese came through they then the Communists and at that point they had to leave and so they came back to the United States and they settled in the Swannanoa Valley of North Carolina where they settled and they settled there because there was a they were Presbyterian missionaries there was a Presbyterian conference center and retirements type community there and that's where I was born in rear'd so that was my grandparents on my mother's side my grandparents on my daddy's side were from Charlotte North Carolina there were dairy farmers and but they also were very involved in their church and they too were Presbyterians sometimes when I talk shocked people by the fact that my daddy is a Baptist but daddy was raised Presbyterian too but you know it was wonderful growing up in a family where mother was Presbyterian daddy was bad just so we were just not in my nation it didn't matter what denomination you were from as long as you love the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and you went to a church that taught the scriptures it didn't matter what denomination it was so we grew up that way and so my grandparents on my daddy's side were very involved in their church and my grandfather had a prayer group that met on his farm and the focus of this prayer group was that God would somehow bring somebody to Charlotte North Carolina to hold a revival and that out of that revival somebody would be raised up to go around the world and preach the gospel and it wasn't long after that that Mordecai ham came to Charlotte and had a tent revival and on the last night of that tent revival daddy gave his heart to the Lord Jesus now he thought he was a Christian in fact he was involved in his youth group but that night he realized he had never made Jesus Christ the Lord of his life and so he gave his heart to the Lord that night and he went home and he told my grandmother about it and the grandparents and of course they were thrilled and never did they dream that their prayer would be answered that it would be their own son that would one day go around the world and preach the gospel to many people well then my daddy decided he wanted to go to Bible School so they began to look around for a Bible School and they decided on Bob Jones Bible College which at that time was in Cleveland Tennessee and they went there but you know it was sort of chilly and it was cold and it was damp and and they don't believe in complaining at Bob Jones so daddy couldn't complain about the drip that was on his bed and he was getting cold he was getting the flu and he was getting everything so he went to look at some magazines and he found a Bible School in Florida and there were palm trees and there were orange trees and he began to talk to his parents about possibly transferring to this Bible School near Tampa and they finally agreed so about two years ago I was asked to go and cut a ribbon in Cleveland Tennessee where they were naming a street for my daddy it's now Lee University of very fine University but anyway I went there and the president of that college took me into an office which is his office where he believes that dr. Bob Jones was sitting and he put me in the place where he daddy was standing when dr. Bob said to daddy if you leave my school you'll never amount to anything so but you know in parentheses you know of course daddy has received a lot of criticism and some of you are aware of it some not but he's received a lot of criticism over the years but never one time in my entire life growing up in our home did I ever hear him criticized his criticizers never never said a bad word about him in fact he went a step further and he said I listened to my critics because maybe they have something that I need to hear something that I need to learn and so he went a step further and listened to his critics and so daddy went to that Bible School in fact you know you can read in his biography but he fell in love with a young girl in that Bible School and she broke his heart a little later and thankfully that happened because I wouldn't be here if she hadn't my parents a mother now on the other hand here she was in China and she went off to North Korea to high school in fact I was privileged to go with her back to North Korea they consider her as a daughter of North Korean so they treated us like royalty but I couldn't go see the school because that's the Russian embassy now in North Korea so we were unable to go into the building where she went to school but that's where she went to high school and so she came to the st. went to Wheaton College daddy was transferring to Wheaton College even though he was 2 years older than my mother they went to school together in the same class because daddy had gone to Bible School for two years but now my mother had this dream of being an old maid missionary to Tibet she wanted to wear her hair in a bun and she wanted to go to Prairie Bible Institute in Canada and she wanted to be an old maid missionary to Tibet a one day mother and daddy were getting ready to go out separately on a child evangelism mission and it was a Sunday afternoon and the men were on one side of the hallway and the women were on the other praying before they went out on the mission and mother heard daddy praying she hadn't met him yet and she heard him praying and she said to herself that young man knows to whom he's praying and that impressed her a lot well daddy had heard about this beautiful young woman from China and she was deeply spiritual and she was just a wonderful intelligent intellectual and so anyway someone wanted to introduce them and finally one of their friends introduced them and their first date was to the Messiah and daddy said now I've heard this story from daddy I've heard it from mother of her daddy tell the grandchildren I've read it in books and I hear different versions of it but to tell you the truth I believe that it was love at first sight daddy thought she was absolutely wonderful from the first day he said it took a year for her to fall in love with him but that's not true because if you read her Diaries she wrote in her diary when she got home to her room that night she said Lord she said if you would allow me to spend the rest of my life with this young man I would consider it the greatest privilege of my life so now what about the old maid missionary obviously she wasn't going to be an old maid anymore because she was falling in love and they were getting engaged and if you look at this picture of their engagement she's looking very intently at her ring and that's because she can barely see it and if if you go to the library in Charlotte if any of you been to the library in Charlotte okay one or two hands it's worth going to folks it's worth going to it's not a library I wish they called it something else library sounds so boring don't they you know just a bunch of old dusty books this is an aunt hands on a story of the life of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and it's not just about daddy another thing I've never heard daddy say I've never heard him say my ministry it's our ministry everybody that had a part in the ministry from those that cleaned the floor to those that type the letters to those that decide on the platform it was our ministry and more than that it was the Lord's ministry never have I heard him say my ministry so now a mother and daddy are engaged but mother still wants to be a missionary to the bed so she thinks okay I can't be an old maid now but I think I could talk bill into going to debate with me now mother's a pretty strong will strong minded woman and she began her campaign well daddy had no intention whatsoever of going to Tibet as a missionary and so basically they they sort of hit you know butt heads over this situation a couple times to the point that he asked for his ring back and she didn't want to give it back and so she said he said to her okay he said then you know what do you believe God brought us together she said yes I do he said then I'm going to lead and you're going to follow and so she would follow all of her life but you will see shed a very interesting way of following they were married in Montreat North Carolina where I still reside when I'm in North Carolina and it's a privilege to be able to go to the same church that they were married in and that's where I attend church when I'm there and it was as I said it was just love at first sight they were very very much in love and God brought these two people together from two ends of the world with two totally different experiences because he had a unique ministry for them and I can't think of any two people that could have been together that could have done what they did with the unique ministry that God gave them but they were married there in mantri now after they got married two things happen one is that Daddy accepted a position in a church in Illinois outside of Chicago now mother was not very much for this daddy was still a little bit of a chauvinist at that time and he didn't think it was important that he and mother necessarily agree on these things and he didn't really ask her advice about a lot of things to the point that one day she said to him I'd be ashamed to admit that I had married a woman whose advice I could not take and so he began to take her advice thankfully but he took this church and an outside of Illinois and she was a beedi entwine she went with him and did everything she could to make it cozy and fun but she always felt like the daddy had been called to a larger audience and so but you know what that did to Daddy number one it gave daddy a pastor's heart those of you who are pastors in this room you have a different ministry than an evangelist and daddy received a pastor's heart there you know an evangelist can come into a city like daddy does and stay it used to be several weeks now it's down to you know just a few days or a weekend but then he leaves and it's the pastors that have the responsibility but daddy also it gave him a pastor's heart in that he never ever went to a city without being invited by the pastoral Association of that city both Protestant and Catholic because he felt that that was extremely important that the pastor's invite him because then he was going to leave and turn everybody that came over to Christ during that crusade he would turn them back over to the churches for discipleship and so he was very tender-hearted toward the pastor's gave him a pastor's heart then another thing he did was that he was president of a school in Minneapolis northwestern schools he was a youngest president of an University at that time again mother didn't feel like this is what his calling was Manetti also learned administration and people think of daddy as being an evangelist and he was that was his foremost thing a preacher but he was also a CEO of a very large organization and his only training was milking cows and so God used that short time of administration administrational duties in Minneapolis to teach him about administration to the point that although he didn't have to do it all those years he was able to stay on top of it and he met the head of the that's why the address for some of you older folks was always Minneapolis Minnesota we never lived there but that's because that's where he met George Wilson who became the head of the office and ran it for many many years when he was in Chicago at that church he also met Bev Shea and he would not have met Bev Shea if it hadn't been for that experience so how God weaves these things together you know someone one time said you only know God's will in retrospect you know ahead as we step forward it's by faith we look back we see how God weaves things together in our lives and so then after that look let me back up one we we went to live with my grandmother and grandfather for a little while because daddy realized by that time he was with youth for Christ and he was beginning to travel the world and he asked my mother he said if I'm going to be traveling the world where would you like me to where would you like to live now daddy if he had chosen it would have been Florida or California because he's like me we like palm trees we like orange trees we like warm weather and mother said she'd like to live in North Carolina close to her parents and he said fine that's what we'll do then and so they went to live with my grandparents for a little while until the house right across the street opened up for sale and they bought that little house it didn't look like that when they bought it was just a little summer cottage and they paid about $4,500 for it but it was on two Lots and had a little stream on it and right as I said right across the street from my maternal grandparents now my grandparents didn't understand why God brought them back for China you know here they had learned the language they loved the people they loved the country and here they had to come back to North Carolina where my grandfather was a physician he was a surgeon but you know God knew that there were going to be five little grandchildren that we're going to need their grandparents right across the street because their daddy was going to be gone most of the time how gracious God was to provide my grandparents for us and so it was a real blessing also we grew up in a little community that was comprised mainly of Presbyterian missionaries and Presbyterian pastors and these people now I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina most of us are you know rednecks or mountain folk I mean we are not sophisticated people up there in these little coves of North Carolina but I grew up in a little tiny Cove that because there were missionaries from all over the world it was like being in a little international community I had you know we I heard every language of the world spoken because all these missionaries came back there and they loved their countries and so they were talking their languages so I had Alert I mean I heard Spanish and I heard Portuguese and Japanese and Korean and Chinese and many different dialects from Africa and so we grew up in a little community very small but yet we're totally in the sense that they had a world vision they also were still interested in the countries they came from and so he grew up with an interest in world values and the world view of things not just our little Cove and that's very unusual for that part of the country so there again the Lord was preparing us and our family for a world ministry and so we grew up in that little town the other thing that this these people did for us was they gave us an appetite for what they had now I had a wonderful heritage on both sides of the family my grandparents were Christians on both sides way back my parents were wonderful Christians my daddy was one of the best-known preachers in the world but you know that did not make me a Christian because one thing God doesn't have God does not have grandchildren you have to make that decision for yourself personally and so mother began to tell us about the Lord Jesus of course from the time we could understand and as I said I knew that I was bad I knew I needed something in my life I knew that I needed my sins forgiven ever since I was a little girl because she told me every day and she me as I said she said I was you know tried so hard to be good but I was so bad at it and so about at the age of 4 years old I asked the Lord Jesus into my heart now obviously at 4 years old you don't understand the theological implications of that decision but I remember Carl Bart one time was asked in a seminary what was the greatest important theological truth he had ever learned and the student that asked him sat down with a notebook and was going to write the answer when dr. Carl Bart stood up and he said the greatest theological truth that I have ever learned is that Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so and so a little girl of 4 years old can understand that anybody any age can understand that that we love him because he first loved us and so I did give my heart to him although I didn't understand all the theological implications and that's where the growth came in that's where growing in the Lord that's where you know the being a Christian is a commitment not only to a person but it's a commitment a process it doesn't always happen just overnight all of our lives we are in process in growing in him and so at the age of four I began that process in my life and I still have a long way to go those are my two sisters they're five of us and mother said she was glad to have three girls that came along before the boys she got the practice on the girls first now my mother had a very interesting way of punishing now I've tried it usually bring one with me do you remember those of you are old enough those shoe trees used to put in your shoes had a piece of wood on each end in the middle was this piece of you know wire well that's what she spanked us with and believe me it hurt and when we were all bad she lined us up on the bed like a xylophone and played us like that but anyway we got to the point where here we were living next door to my grandparents and people always asked me said when did you first know that your daddy was well known and I said well you know I really don't know because we were in this little town that accepted us for the way we were but you know when magazines start coming to your house and your daddy's picture is on the front of it whether it's time or look or life you begin a little to get a little suspicious because my friends up the street their parents from you know missionaries or pastors and their picture wasn't on the front of magazines but the main thing that made us know that dad that daddy was well-known were the tourists that began to come and they came by the busloads and they would park on the side of the street and they would all get out of the buses and they would all come in the yard and they would chip away at the little gate in the fence and they would call us out by name and they would want to have their picture taken with us they would knock on the door they would peer in the windows and it got to the point where we had to close the curtains and on the weekends especially where we were like having prisoners in our home and so it got to the point that my parents began to talk about possibly moving now we didn't want to move too far from my grandparents and so they began to look for some property not too far away and they were told of a pretty little Cove not far just a mile up the road and so they began to look at it and it was you know hard to get up there had been owned by mountain folk and the mountain folk had subsidized their meager income by cutting down the trees and so it was not a very pretty piece of property just some little scrub trees and later when we moved up there we found out that they had subsidized in other ways also I think we counted 18 stills when they finally bought the property but anyway but my mother could see mother had a wonderful vision she was an artist and she could see what it could be and so daddy left to go on a trip and he said you make the decision whether you want to buy the property or not and so she did when he came home she told him she had bought it he said what you did what she said well you told me to but she only paid 13 dollars an acre now do you know what a blessing that acreage has been to our family the privacy that has afforded us in the 60s daddy received many many many threats some of them written in blood and so the FBI came and made us put up a fence around part of the property and they didn't want to mother said that was an affront to her guardian angels and she didn't like that one bit but anyway they had to put up a fence around part of the property but God was so gracious in providing that property for them at thirteen dollars an acre today a postage stamp of you know 1/4 of an acre in that same town now is probably a hundred thousand dollars so how gracious the Lord was and so when we moved that's the way our house looked at first it was just a great big old log cabin that's what it is my mother loved primitive early American things and she didn't have any money so she went around all the coves looking for log cabins and she would buy a log cabin and she never paid more than 50 dollars for one and she would find old bricks that was being torn down in a building and so they built this house up on the mountain that just a great big log cabin and it's still that way today and daddy does not live luxuriously in fact I guess I think it was a Muhammad Ali that came and I think he was a little disappointed that he wasn't picked up in a big limousine and that he didn't arrive and we took him to the to the guest bathroom it didn't have crystal chandeliers and gold fountains and all that is just an old log cabin later he said you know he said Mr Graham lives the way of man of God should live and daddys never cared about material things at all he was given everything away I mean everything and since he's living to be 96 we're getting a little bit worried that he's going to outlive is his financial situation but anyway it's just a simple old log cabin and that's the way it looks today that was taken an aerial photo that one of my children took so that's the way it looks today and the group the trees have grown up and it's a beautiful lush Valley today that overlooks the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in front of him and if you saw the cross or you've seen some of that you've seen some of the views and you've seen some of the inside of the house and as I said it's just a log cabin my mother she loved fireplaces now daddy couldn't care less about a fireplace and I never understood why because in our home down the one I was raised in the first one you saw we had a lovely fireplace and it you know mother even I mean I've known mother to turn the air-conditioning on and make a fire she loved fires she would carry a candle with her when she traveled with Daddy because just that little glow of a candle meant so much to her it was just you know and I couldn't understand why daddy didn't like them till one day I thought about their childhoods and I remembered mother being raised in China and here she was reared where the men and the women gathered together in one of the homes in the evening and the men would read mainly from the classics and the women did handwork but it was around a little cold fireplace because that was the only heat they had and so my mother loved fireplaces unit meant to hurry all the warm fuzzy feelings of security and love and home and parents and family now daddy on the other hand got up at 4 o'clock in the morning to milk 20 cows before he went to school and he went to bed very early after he did his homework because he had to come home to the team for 20 cows and then go to do his homework and then the next morning get up and do the same thing so he never saw that around fireplace and so he didn't really care about fireplaces well when they built the new house this log cabin mother told him she wanted more than one fireplace now daddy thought that was extravagant but he finally gave in and said okay you can have two fireplaces you can have one in the kitchen because it's a great big old country kitchen and you can have one in the living room well um mother wanted more than two fireplaces so daddy thought that was much too extravagant I don't think he actually told her no she couldn't have more but I don't know she he might have but he left to go to India to preach for eight weeks mother turned to the Builder and she said mr. Sawyer I want you to build fireplaces faster than you've ever built them in your life and by the time daddy came home she had five built so and I told you she had an interesting way of following she taught us girl she said you know there comes a time to quit submitting and start outwitting and she was a very good out Witter mother had a wonderful wonderful sense of humor she loved loved loved practical jokes for example sometimes they would come back to haunt her now one year daddy and mother and Grady Wilson and his wife went to Europe they were in Paris and Grady and daddy had to go on to Moscow so they left the women in Paris with strict instructions that they were not to spend any money well now you know how futile that is man to tell women not to spend money so as soon as the men left they looked at each other and said let's go to the Paris flea market so they went down to the flea market and sure enough wasn't long before Grady's wife saw something she liked and she said I think I'm gonna buy that she did mother saw a little tiny oil painting she said I think I'll buy that and she did now they get back to the hotel room and they say now what are we going to do they said the men are going to come home and see that we bought something and Gradius wife said no problem I'll just sit mine up here on the shelf they'll think it belongs to the hotel and Mother's a good idea I'll just hang my painting on the wall same thing well the men came back and they were packing up to go to Zurich Switzerland and radius' wife looked up they'll machine hmm I really like that inkwell up there I think I was gonna take it cuz she wrapped it up she put in her suitcase mother said yeah I like that painting over there you know the hotel has plenty of me won't miss this one so she took it and wrapped it up and put it in her suitcase and there are two three hours outside of Paris driving along when they start giggling and obviously the men want to know why they were giggling and they told them and uncle Grady turned white and they said what's the matter with you he said you know I thought you girls were stealing that stuff and I took it and put it all back again so some sometimes Mama's jokes went too far and four you know and she had a very interesting way of disciplining us children you might have if you've read any of my brothers books you'll see a few little places in there but one time we were all in the car and my brother Franklin is as much as I respect and admire and love him when he was a kid he was a pest in fact he was such a pest at one time he got in my way when I was baking a cake and I cut the end of his finger off now he'll tell you that he got a shot off in Vietnam that's just an absolute lie he never went to Vietnam but anyway we mother we had we all in the back seat of the car and like you know the brakes that's all we had and we didn't have no seat belts or anything we're in the car and he was pestering us girls he could have all three of us girls crying at one time with her with his hands tied behind his back so mother was sick and tired of it so she pulled over the side of the road jerked him out and put him in the trunk so we keep driving along and all of a sudden mother said hmm I wonder if he can breathe so she pulls over again she stops she opens the trunk and she said now Franklin can you breathe yes ma'am good slam the trunk down again we went and did the errands and did all that we had to do we go to the driving and those days it was even before McDonald's but we had a little Drive in a national called winks and we went to winks driving it was the kind you know you order from the little box and there and then the girls come out and bring it to you well people were very surprised to see mother get out of the car open the trunk asked my brother what he wanted to eat close the trunk again and then when the girl came with the food same thing well that gets out of the car opens a trunk that this time she left it open so he could eat at least you know with some air but she had a very interesting way of punishing us one time my middle son was getting engaged and he wanted to be engaged up there in North Carolina but his fiancee was from Jackson Mississippi real southern town and so he mentioned her his fiancee that his grandmother made the best blackberry cobbler in the world and she disagreed with him she said no my grandmother from Jackson Mississippi makes the best blackberry cobbler in the world so he said okay for our engagement party we're going to have a bake-off between the two grandmothers and so they did now you can imagine this poor little woman from Jackson Mississippi was scared to death she had to make a blackberry cobbler for the Graham family so she was really nervous I think everybody in her church had to taste blackberry cobbler over the next few weeks well they come and she has her cobbler and mother that day my sister came to visit me and I said is mama doing anything about that blackberry cobbler I hope she's at least getting on Marie Callender's or something at the grocery store she doing something she says she's doing something like Gigi you know mama I don't know she's doing something so sure enough um we come back the evening and mother had everything beautiful there was lace tablecloth there was the real China there was real crystal in the glasses there were candlelight everywhere it was so romantic and everybody sat in the living room and in came the grandmother from Jackson Mississippi and she presented her cobbler it was beautiful it was crispy it was the brown was just the right color that odor was just emitting it was just beautiful so everybody clapped and she put hers on the table mother comes out of the kitchen with her blackberry cobbler it looked beautiful it was in a dish that was a little odd but mother is odd so anyway it was it was fine it was beautiful the crust was absolutely gorgeous it was just the right color Brown and the juices were using up and and you know she would it was just beautiful and so when she presented it she leaned down she pulled the crust back and there was this dead chicken now he's sitting there he's got feathers all over him his beak is crooked his claws are sticking up he's got blood everywhere those were not juices it was blood from this chicken he was horrible and everybody gasped and she said oh you said cobbler I thought you said gobbler I'm so sorry so that would be the kind of thing mother would do is interesting to go the grocery store and have the manager asked me what mother wanted to do with a live chicken she tried to explain to her that the grocery store didn't sell live chickens and she'd have to find someone else to go get it but she had made a story after story after story I could tell about my mother because she was an absolute character you can see there she's got a face of a character she was always thinking of something to do some practical jokes something to do and we miss her terribly obviously and after when I was telling daddy you know one day I said you know mama said you know that we were supposed to quit submitting and start out wedding at some time he got a twinkle in his eye and he said she did a lot of that didn't she honey and she did but she was also a very very deeply spiritual but this son right here this my middle son he was my prodigal and he ran away at home at 16 years old and he was a mess he had been the sunshine of our home until he turned about 12 or 13 and everything changed and so he gave us nothing but trouble and finally ran away from home and even it came to the point when he came back for a short period of time that we had to ask the police to remove him from our home it was that bad but anyway my you know here I was I had seven children and we always sat in the front row of church and I was so proud of my children you know they would behave in churches well the youngest when I had to hold very very tightly but anyway they behaved in church and they looked good in church and then all of a sudden here came tallien and he came home one day and he had pierced ears and those days is mended not young boys in pierce their ears not Christian boys you know that was something new and he had cut his hair like a rooster and he had colored it like a rooster and so here he had earrings and he got a tattoo and he had his hair like a rooster and Here I am in church with all these perfect children and a rooster and so I was so embarrassed until I realized you know this is my problem I was the one that had the problem I was more interested in how I looked as a mother to seven children behaving in church than I was about tallying you know what my mother did she sent him a box of earrings and so at Christmastime he had these long balls hanging down Christmas balls and at Thanksgiving he had a knife and a fork and those were hanging down and that's what those are you know what she was telling me she was telling me Gigi don't major on minors this too will pass and as I was telling you I grew up in a community and in a family that gave me an appetite for what they had do you know that how important it is we have the statistics you can read them of how many young people are leaving our churches and I wonder if it's not because many of us do not give them an appetite for what we have you know do we enjoy our faith do they see us enjoying our faith do they want what we have or are we so miserable they say why in the world would we want that but I grew up around people that gave me an appetite when I was a little girl one day I came down for breakfast and mother had gotten up late so she had thrown a housecoat on and she'd put some rollers in her hair and you know she had gotten my brother Franklin out of his crib and dumped him in the hot chair without changing his diaper and she put my food down in front of me by this time my sisters had come and they were talking a mile a minute which was irritating the tar out of me it takes me a little bit to get up in the morning and so she put my breakfast down in front of me she said I slammed my fort down I said mama I said between looking at you and listening to my sisters and smelling Franklin I'm not hungry and I got up and left the table now I thought they were a spiritual illustration you know between our young people looking at some of us and listening to others and smelling others they're not interested in what we have to say about our faith and it's so important that we give them an appetite well I wasn't going to share this story but because of the audience here tonight I think I will tell em who is now pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale Florida where dr. James Kennedy was pastor for many years and as you know he was very pro-life and very involved in the pro-life movement but anyway he was my prodigal and now here he is Pat he was hiding in the dumpsters behind that church he was kicked out of that school because that's where we lived in Fort Lauderdale and now he's senior pastor you talk about God's grace God has a sense of humor too believe me but anyway the the week he ran away from home I was devastated obviously and I could tell that whole story but I stayed at home I didn't want to go out and finally by the end of the week I thought you know what GG you need to get out of here and so I had a standing nail appointment and my nail tech was a lovely Catholic friend of mine from Columbia South America and the woman that usually got her nails done right after me was a Jewish friend and I called her my favorite Easter Egg because she was shaped like an easter egg and she loved bright colored clothes you know those little Jewish ladies in Fort Lauderdale they stay sexy till the day they die they don't mind spending money on themselves and they look good believe me but anyway she would come usually but she came early that day and when I walked in they both looked at me and they said what's the matter there's something wrong with you and so I shared with them the story of tolian now this was lent and so my Catholic friend had the hour of around 4 o'clock in the morning that she had to get up and go in pray at church and she would put her raw raincoat over her pajamas and she would go to the church not far away and she would pray and my Jewish friend knowing that Catholics buy candles and do something and pray she looked in her purse and you know how Jews are about their money they're a little tight and you looked in her purse for some dollars and she handed them to my Catholic friend and she said tonight when you go I want you to pray that Gigi's son comes home and so my friend went that night and she went over to pray at the Statue of Jesus the crucifix and all of a sudden she said no Jesus I'm not gonna pray to you tonight I'm going to go pray to your mother because she knows what it was like to lose a son and you know is almost exactly at that same time that my son called his older brother and we found him so when people say that God doesn't hear the prayers of Catholics and Jews I argue with them believe me but anyway it's just that mother and did not have mother and daddy just don't have a judgmental attitude never did now mother's written many books and this one's called the legacy of a packrat and it's just just to show you what kind of person she was again but all through this book legacy of a packrat their little drawings of a mouse now the publishers didn't get the mouse quite right she didn't prove of the mouse so finally she got hopefully out of a cage or out of a mousetrap I don't know what she did I never asked her how this mouse lost his life but anyway she got a mouse that had lost its life and she took it and she squished it and she got him as flat as she could get him and she put him in a copy machine and she copied the front and she copied the back and she copied the ears and she copied his little whiskers and she copied his little feet and she sent that to the publisher and she said that's what a mouse looks like and I want my mouse to look like in my book so as I said she had quite an imagination and a sense of humor but mother was also the wind beneath Daddy's wings if it hadn't been for my mother my daddy would never been able to do what he did mother was an intellectual she was a writer many times you all will read my mother's poetry sometimes it can be a little sad a little melancholic introspective and people ask me why and it's because I never ever ever ever heard my mother complain about daddy being gone with us she shared the sunshine with her pen she shared sometimes her doubts and her frustrations and her disappointments but never with us children and you know if mother had been a complaining wife I don't know where we would be today I don't think we would have grown up with a sense of ministry I think that we would have grown up resenting daddy resenting ministry and resenting God himself for taking our daddy away and so I just praised God for a woman that was willing to sacrifice and never complain one time and she was positive she would quote the old mountain man that said make the least of all that goes the most of all that comes and when daddy would leave she would look at us and say you know you know kids it's what we need to do is not focus on daddy's leaving we need to focus on his coming back again and that's exactly what I think is what we need to be doing today with all the bad news we hear we don't focus on that we focus on the fact that Jesus Christ is coming back again and going to make everything right and that's what our focus needs to be but mother was definitely the wind beneath his wings if it hadn't been for her that many illustrations wouldn't have been there many she had a photographic memory for many things and a great help to him and such fun and he would always have a twinkle in his eye when she was around he was desperately in love with her very loving couple and they were not afraid to show their affection to each other in front of us children which gave us a lot of comfort because you know and that your daddy's gone so much of the time it's wonderful to know that when they come back together again there's a lot of physical love there and they showed it to us because you know he'd be gone for so long that I remember my little brother Franklin waking up one day he slept in a little trundle bed under mother's bed that she kept for when we had bad dreams or nightmares and he would he would woke up one morning and he didn't know that Daddy had come home he peered over the edge of the bed he said mama who's that strange man in bed with you so he was gone quite a bit but there was a very much love between them can any of you all identify with that that's just a few of us we have a very big family daddy has 19 grandchildren and 42 great-grandchildren and I have one and three on the way great-grandchildren so he will have four great-great grandchildren before this year is out and you know what when you have a family that big you've got problems and people somehow feel that we have a Teflon umbrella over our family and that problems just roll off of us they have us on a pedestal they think that you know somehow we're being taken care of in a special way and we don't go through the same things they go through let me tell you we go through exactly the same things you go through I was thinking do they have all the different things in our family with that big family the different issues that we've had in our family and I think that we have gone through every single issue you can think of except praise God not abortion now that doesn't mean we haven't had some pregnancies before marriage that doesn't mean that we haven't had some pregnancies that were put up for adoption that doesn't mean that we haven't gone through those things but thank the Lord as far as I know no single person in our family has even thought of an abortion and I'm so grateful for that we believe in life but we've gone through everything else and there's not a single thing you could come up and tell me tonight that your family is going through that I couldn't say I understand that I not only sympathize but I empathize because our family has been there but you know what God's grace is greater God's forgiveness is greater God's mercy is greater and he has shown that to us and to our family again and again and I again and believe me that is what we depend on God's grace and God's mercy it all has to do with the Lord Jesus Christ and what he did for us on the cross that's what it's all about people ask me to all my family reunions I say not even Yelp it you can imagine with that many people trying to get together it would be K out that's just calling the people that live in the area and see if they want to come up to my dad's house for a hotdog on 4th of July and that's what shows up so we have a lot of family that was my mother's service that was held in Montreat and it was standing room only people came from all over the world for her service and her casket was made by prisoners from Angola prison in Louisiana the largest no-parole prison in our country and my brother was there preaching one time and the warden is a wonderful born-again Christian and one of the things he does he tries to give the men some some opportunities to better themselves and they're going to be there for life anyway he doesn't feel that they need to be punished more so he gives them opportunities to make a little bit of money so they can better some of the equipment or the playground or whatever and one of the things they do is make caskets and so my brother asked if they would make one for my mother and for my daddy because they just wanted old wooden caskets and they didn't want things special and the names of the ones that made my mother were in the foot of hers her Cask and that she's buried at the library and her tombstone simply reads end of construction thank you for your patience and you know that should encourage all of us in this room because I don't know about you all but like you know I do feel I'm still a work in progress and if we're sitting in this room tonight we're still under construction God's not through with us yet and that is such a source of encouragement for me that God has not given up on me yet and I'm so grateful the Chinese symbol above her name is a Chinese symbol that sometimes in Oriental languages they put two symbols together to mean a word and that is the word righteousness in Chinese and it's two symbols the top symbol is a symbol for a lamb and the bottom symbol is a symbol for me so it's a lamb over me is the word for righteousness in Chinese and she wanted that on her tombstone and that's probably the last picture of the five children with Daddy looking that well my brother the youngest brother lives out in Seattle and doesn't get home too often and daddy doesn't look quite that well today but that was taken a few months ago you know them try to explain them to Daddy it was funny they wanted to come visit anyway we worked it out and so forth and I went in to prepare daddy for you know these bearded felt fellows that were coming in and I told him who they were at everything and daddy was always so gracious and he got up and he sat in his chair and they came in and they were very sweet didn't stay long and the one who's the pastor Allen prayed and prayed for daddy and anyway then they left and that evening one of Daddy's nurses said now mr. Graham let me ask you something did you ever grow a beard he said no I never did but he said now Ruth always wanted me to but I never did and they said well what'd you think of Willie's beard daddy was quiet yeah then he said you know what it sure makes him a lot of money I said daddy you caught on real quick and that's just not too long ago and that was just very recently and you know daddy has always just shown total love and acceptance a story that I'll leave you with is that I was after it was it was the 75th anniversary of Time magazine so everybody who had been on the cover of Time magazine over the last 75 years had been invited and daddy of course was invited this was some years ago and I was his date and it was right at the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal with press Clinton so of course the Clintons were there and daddy was sitting at the Clinton's table and I was at a table not too far away and the Clintons are extremely gracious people and daddy of course is gracious with everybody and but in the car going back to the hotel I asked him I said daddy let me ask you something you know how do we as believers deal with things that we don't agree with or lifestyles that we don't agree with or situations like this an immorality and so forth how do we deal with this and he answered me like this he said honey he said I believe the New Testament teaches that our job is to love it's the Holy Spirit's job to convict and it's God's job to judge and I think you know of all of us would put more into practice the love we know that we can reach more people this way than we can this way and so if we can learn to practice the love of God and I'm not talking about being weak I'm not talking about truth because Bible talks about truth in love but that we can show more love and let the Holy Spirit do the convicting and that God do the judging because he's the only one that knows the beginning to the end and if daddy were here tonight and when he's gone he's 96 now and when he's gone the thing I'm going to remember besides the personal things of course that he's told me I'm going to remember his voice in the stadiums of the world saying God loves you God loves you God loves you and that's daddy and so thank you for having me tonight now you know more about our family than you ever wanted to know but God is so good and he's so gracious and just remember it's all about grace and mercy and forgiveness and it's all because of Jesus Christ and what he did on the cross so thank you you

Channel: Molly Smith

Views: 96,175

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Id: qXy_X8s7RaQ

Length: 54min 54sec (3294 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2015