As Billy Graham traveled the world preaching the gospel, his wife, Ruth Graham (1920-2007), stayed behind to raise their five children. They were married in 1943 and moved to Montreat, North Carolina, so Ruth could be near parents when Billy was absent from the home, sometimes for months on end. Their eldest, Virginia (Gigi), was born when Billy was away on an evangelistic crusade. Their two sons, Franklin and Ned, were rebels in their teenage years. They regularly pushed the boundaries and tested limits. Franklin was especially challenging. He smoked, drank, and drove way too fast. How appropriate that he titled the story of his early life, Rebel with a Cause. Writing became Ruth’s outlet. She didn’t write to be published; she wrote to release emotions, especially given the evangelical culture in which she lived that fostered the myth that faithful parents will invariably produce believing children. She said of her writing, “I was terribly shy and diffident about my poems at first, but I suddenly decided, ‘Shucks, if they express how I feel and what someone else is going through, it really doesn’t matter whether everybody likes them.’”
Ruth’s book, Prodigals and Those Who Love: Words of Encouragement for Those Who Wait, centered on the Prodigal Son parable in Luke 15.11-32. It’s a well-known story Jesus told about a son who squandered the family inheritance and wandered far from home. While we give most of our attention to this wayward son, it’s the father’s extravagant love that welcomes his son home again. Ruth introduces readers to five prodigals from church history and concludes with poems and prayers for those who wait for prodigal children to come home to God. One of her poems, written as a prayer, leads us to pray: