■ ■ ■Immersion in the furnace of leadership formation began with a
painful experience with a beautiful young woman.
Emily Cavanaugh was a dark-haired college classmate whom
Billy had asked to marry him, even though they had known each
other only one semester. Her reluctance to immediately answer
worried Billy; yet after months of deliberation, Emily finally
accepted his proposal.
But one evening at a class party she sat with him on a swing
and told him she had to give back his ring. “I’m not sure we’re right
for each other. I just don’t see any real purpose in your life yet.”
She was interested in an older student, Charles Massey. She saw in
him what she didn’t see in Billy—goals, plans, responsibility.
Billy was devastated. “All the stars have fallen out of my sky,”
he wrote to a friend.
For months afterward, through the spring and summer, Billy
roamed the streets for hours at night, praying for direction. He
felt “a tremendous burden.” He was not simply grieving a roman-
tic breakup but confronting reality. In fact, many realities. He
didn’t, in fact, have a sense of purpose. He had a vague sense that
God was calling him to preach, yet he had an equal sense that he,
like Moses, was not eloquent enough for the task.
Some see such realities and simply move on. But in a manner
that was to typify his long life of service, Billy agonized over all the
elements with full engagement of his mind and emotions. Over
and over again throughout his life, Billy would face conflicting
realities of many sorts, and he would lay them before God with
extreme earnestness, spending many entire nights on his knees
or flat on his face in prayer, seeking the right course of action.
After months of angst, one autumn evening Billy wandered
through a golf course, finally kneeling on the eighteenth green.
Eyes filled with tears, he gazed upward. “All right, Lord! If you
want me, you’ve got me,” Billy declared. “If I’m never to get
Emily, I’m gonna follow you. No girl or anything else will come
first in my life again. You can have all of me from now on. I’m
gonna follow you at all cost.”
Igniting!