Ruth Graham on Forgiving Her Famous Father - Billy Graham

well so many people are kind you know they they remember daddy too and so we're grateful for that but we each have to have our own life and i think mother and daddy encourage us to be individuals and so i don't we lost the patriarch but he'd been gone for quite a while you know he was not with us for quite a while so um we've adapted but it's not easy i miss him i miss knowing he's here you know just in the world but i know where he is for the first time in my life i know where my father is he usually was somewhere i had no clue where he was but now i know exactly where he is oh we miss him too tell me what it was like growing up as a grandchild well we didn't know any different he was daddy and we we grew up in a small community of retired missionaries and retired pastors and um they were used to traveling the globe preaching the gospel so we grew up in that kind of atmosphere and when they saw a little grand misbehaving they didn't gossip about us they prayed for us and what a difference that made and every wednesday morning i remember seeing some of the older folks walking to my grandparents house to have a prayer meeting and they'd be on their knees praying and what an example that was for us so i know that that was the foundation of what it was like but it was only until i went off to boarding school and people treated me differently that i thought something was different and i never felt entitled mother and daddy never would let us feel entitled but people treated us differently and that made me realize that something is different but we just grew up a normal family i mean it was just as dysfunctional as everybody else i kind of i wonder about that ruth but okay we'll go with that you also share in your new book forgiving my father forgiving myself that you didn't know what it was like to spend time with just your dad but there were always people around that's right there are always are when you have a person of note or you have a politician or you have someone who's in the business world they usually have assistants and people around them all the time and we did and these people were friends i mean they became like family but they weren't family and my father was he traveled a lot and when he came home he was tired or preoccupied or preparing for the next um event so he didn't have much time especially for a younger daughter who tends to be um more introverted and quieter and um so it was just i didn't have that kind of time with my father and i i missed it and i wasn't the kind that would assert myself and grab it you know some are very you know they'll go get it whether they are welcomed or not but um but i didn't and i wish that i had done more of that but i didn't because that was my personality and so through the years you're kind of burying things away and you kind of reveal some of that a lot of it in your new book for giving my father forgiving myself why did you decide to write this book it's so candid and so honest thank you and also this part of forgiving my father is also forgiving god yeah for um not meeting my expectations you know and god sometimes doesn't meet our expectations our human expectations because our expectations fit our thinking not his so that's that's in there too but i wrote this book because i've struggled with forgiveness and forgiveness is a struggle and i have struggled with it and i thought you know if i'm struggling with it they're bound to be a lot of other people who have struggled so i began to read and i thought you know i want to find out what worked what didn't work what what is appropriate what's biblical and i couldn't find a book that was really honest you know really grappled with it struggled with it and i thought well then i'll just write it so that's what i did oh you did it so well thank you so well ruth you talk candidly about your first marriage and that really was an exercise in forgiveness and also just peeling back a lot of layers of things that you had hidden inside tell us about that heart-wrenching time in your life well i grew up around honorable men yeah never occurred to me that my husband of 18 years had been unfaithful to me for a number of years and it just pulled the rug out from under me and um we worked it out tried to work it out through counseling we did everything we could but i realized that forgiveness is unconditional reconciliation is conditioned on the changed behavior of the one who's done the wounding and my husband wasn't changing and i felt you know i just can't do this anymore and that's when i claimed promises you know the latter will be greater than the former and he will do a new thing in you but those promises were fit my thinking he was god was doing a new thing in me i was going to be different than i was before so i had to look at it through god's eyes and not my own and it was a very hard time it's hard on my children and i was so angry with my husband and it really wasn't he died shortly thereafter after we divorced it wasn't until after he died that i was able to come to a place of forgiveness and say i forgive you and god would you tell him that i have forgiven him because and i know there's no theology for that but god can work that out and i just felt that it was important for me to be able to forgive my first husband for for his infidelity you alluded to ruth that you were like you were donning a mask even when you found out about your husband's adultery putting on the mask like many of us do pretending everything is okay you know wanting to gloss everything over and holding in the anger because you were not taught to be angry that's right no we were not allowed to be angry and you know i remember asking my mother saying something to my mother like i'm angry you can't be angry well but what did i do with those emotions yeah you know because anger isn't a real emotion and it's paul says be angry but don't don't sin um so i just stuffed it and i stuffed it and i stuffed it and i stuffed it and that's not a healthy thing to do and again i talked about in the book that because my father was gone i felt insecure and again i read it as abandonment he'd bless his heart he would never have wanted to do that but i felt insecure and i would have said jesus is my security but deep down where the secrets are kept that wasn't true so i began to look for security elsewhere and married a rebound marriage that it lasted three months and he was abusive so i thought well i'm not gonna i knew enough not to stand on an abusive marriage and let me just tell your audience do not stay in an abusive relationship you have a spiritual responsibility to yourself and to your children to take care of them and it's very important to be able to recognize that and i have a friend in new york who says you know we can go to the zoo and we can enjoy the animals but we don't have to get in the cage with them yeah and i think it's important to remove ourselves from a toxic situation abusive situation but i left him and shortly married another man who we were married for 10 years and i absolutely adored him and he decided after 10 years he didn't want to be married anymore and i was just devastated just totally devastated and so i was single for a while but then a man came along that i'd known for 20 years and he was a pastor and a counselor and he known the family and he knew all my buttons to push and i married him and he was not a good guy and so he divorced me and i'm naturally abusive emotionally verbally emotionally every way and so i just said i'm done with that you know and but he divorced me because i i knew scripturally i wanted to be on scriptural ground so i went through the process of matthew 18 where you you go to the person you go with other people then you go before the church so i did that process and he looked at me one day and he said i never loved you and ruth what was that like when you heard those words well i was at that point i was sort of numb yeah but i was embarrassed and ashamed because i was sitting in front of some elders and i thought oh these people are going to think what in the world but when you get to a certain point it doesn't matter you just you want honesty and you want truth in your relationship and so i realized that i was on the right track and that god was with me and i had seen this man through a horrific automobile accident and i had taken care of him and when i got home from the hospital and he got home from the hospital found out he had spent me into a hundred thousand dollars worth of debt and i remember asking him why did he do that and he said i wanted people to think i'd landed on my feet wow but he landed on my back and this man was a narcissist he was a sociopath and so he knew everything to do to sort of be what he wanted people to think he was but i realized that it was more important for me with the lord to take care of myself and to obey the lord and to get out of that relationship because it was pulling me down and the elders of the church certainly agreed so that was not a problem but after your fourth marriage you also sat down with a friend who said ruth you might be just dealing with abandonment issues and this might be the root of your father's relationship with you that's right and that's when you start to peel back those layers and realize yeah that was really the crux of it that's right i think we all have core issues and if we find that we are repeating a sin or repeating a pattern we have to look at the core issue and i had to look at the core issue but i thought i had had years of counseling but it was this dear friend who sat with me and we were talking about it and i was just sort of beating myself up and he said ruth he said um you felt abandoned as a little girl and i didn't want that to be true i said no you know my father was my hero he is my hero and he would never have hurt my heart but i knew it was true that piece of the puzzle fit and once i put it in the puzzle everything sort of calmed down and i learned to forgive myself because there are no excuses but sometimes there are reasons and so once i had the reason i could forgive myself there was also we only have three minutes and i really want to get to this point too also dealing with unforgiveness with your mom and just tension with your mom you allude to a story of sheila walsh writing a beautiful recollection of spending time with your mom and for you that grieved you because you didn't have that same experience with your mother no i didn't my mother was a wonderful lady just a delightful lady and i loved her but and the lord showed me that how much i loved her when she died but i didn't have that close relationship with her i think we were opposites um and so it was difficult but she was um she didn't want to have a wounded child she loved wounded people but she didn't want a wounded child and she certainly didn't want a wounded daughter talking about her woundedness and so it was very difficult for mother when i wrote my first book in every piece it's a broken heart she did not like that at all and but yet i had to be true to what god had called me to do and she couldn't understand that and and i don't think she ever did but when she died i said lord i need to know that i truly loved my mother and as i cared for her body i realized yes you really do i really did love my mother so ruth i know that there are people watching who are dealing with unforgiveness with a loved one a spouse a friend what is the key that you that people need to realize when walking that journey of forgiveness well first we're talking i believe to believers i mean you have to be a believer you have to be a christian because then you make the choice you make forgiveness is a decision whether you feel like it or not you can say i choose to forgive so and so then that's the doorway by which the holy spirit walks into that decision and then he enables it so you really have to rely on the holy spirit will it happen today will it happen tomorrow probably not and you will have emotions that roll back and you think oh i really didn't forgive yes you did you made the choice to forgive but the emotions don't tell the truth and so you have to go back and say i did forgive and this is the day i forgave and the holy spirit you help me move on through it it's a daily decision absolutely every single day sometimes every moment yes yeah amen to that one thank you so much ruth thank you so much for having me the name of the book is forgiving my father for giving myself an invitation to the miracle of forgiveness maybe you needed to hear ruth's story today maybe you're struggling through unforgiveness you're you're thinking but ruth you don't know or maggie you don't know what i've gone through we don't need to know what you've gone through but we do know that there is power and forgiveness and forgiveness is possible putting aside the faults and saying you know what i'm going to come to you as the way jesus came to us forgiving us of our sins if you need encouragement today if you need prayer today call our prayer lines 1-866-273-4444 or you can email prayer at crossroads.ca amazing people who have walked to the walk talk the talk who have walked through the journey of forgiveness for themselves can give you advice and also pray with you today and encourage you

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Keywords: 100Huntley, Crossroads, Christian, Christians, Christianity, Bible, Christ, Jesus, Religion, ruth graham, billy graham, ruth bell graham, life today, christian, billy graham evangelistic association, forgiving my father, christianity, anne graham lotz, graham, divorce, ruth, franklin graham, forgiveness, billy graham life, billy graham crusade, christian divorce, christian divorce recovery, christian marriage, christianity and divorce, how to forgive, how to forgive someone, forgiving my dad

Id: fl_sL_WyiXE

Length: 13min 57sec (837 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 16 2020