■ ■ ■Russ Busby, longtime official photographer for the Graham asso-
ciation, has provided thousands of striking photos documenting
Billy’s ministry. The hallmark humility natural in Billy’s colleagues
is clearly evident in Busby. “I don’t travel with him,” he says. “I
show up where I’m supposed to.” But he has spent lots of time
with Billy and his family. “His ideas and vision are uncanny,”
Busby says, recognizing the many reasons for Billy to think highly
of himself. “But God has always, in God’s way—and I don’t know
99 percent of it—kept him humble. I don’t know what his ‘thorn-
in-the-flesh’ was.. .” Busby stopped with an edge of humor in
his voice, “it could have been me... .”
Then he explained, “God will do that with each one of us. It’s
how we react to it that counts. Billy may have a bit of ego for a
day or two and be excited about something, but the next time you
see him, he’s back down to reality with himself, before God. He’s
one of the few Christian leaders whose attention God can get
when he wants it. He’s not running so fast or so deeply involved
in his own agenda. When God taps him on the shoulder he says,
‘Yes, Lord,’ rather than ‘Just a minute, I have to finish this.’ God
can quickly get his attention.”
God apparently gets Billy’s attention quite a bit, and the result
is this remarkable phenomenon, not of a placid saint but of bro-
ken saintliness—an often tortured soul with a gracious, loving
smile, a meekness, yet towering strength.
In our research we’ve come across vivid metaphors that
observers have created to describe this paradoxical Billy Graham.
But an image we noticed in a poem by a Franciscan nun, Mary
Karr, published in the Atlantic Monthly, struck us as perhaps the
most fitting. In it, she describes meekness in an arresting way. To
understand the Bible’s use of the word “meek,” she says, we
should picture a great stallion at full gallop. At his master’s voice,
he “seizes up to a stunned but instant halt.” Karr then eloquently
describes the stallion holding its “great power” in check, listening
for the next order.
The Leadership Secrets of Billy Graham