The Reverend Billy Graham said something in the latter years of his ministry that both humbles and haunts me. In an interview with Christianity Today in 1977, Graham spoke of things he would have done differently. “One of my great regrets is that I have not studied enough,” he said. “I wish I had studied more and preached less.”
I love this quote because it reveals Graham’s humility. Despite his enormous impact as a preacher, as an evangelist (at his death, Graham was the only religious leader to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol), Graham recognized his need to have studied. “People have pressured me into speaking to groups when I should have been studying and preparing,” he elaborated. “Donald Barnhouse said that if he knew the Lord was coming in three years, he would spend two of them studying and one preaching. I’m trying to make it up.”
Graham would spend the remainder of his life, “trying to make it up.”
The quote haunts me on Sunday mornings: “Am I properly prepared? Have you studied enough to deliver a ‘word from the Lord?’ If the likes of a Billy Graham wished he had studied more, where does that leave someone like me?”
For all of us, it is a question that begs to be asked, whether you are a preacher, teacher, carpenter, banker, or parent at home. Just as preparing a sermon is a lifelong process and not just studying a solitary section of Scripture, so too, our lives are more than preparing for singular “how-to” events. At the same time, those moments can be revelations of a life in process because learning is a life-long project that is crucial in developing our ever-evolving selves.
Lori and I picked up our grandson, Eli, on the last day of school. I thought about playing Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” for him, but that would have had absolutely no meaning for the second-grader moving on to third.
As we drove away, I thought about summer’s when I was his age. Later, while the two of us took a break from my hitting him ground balls for baseball, I told him about it: how my friend Jimmy Coker and I would ride our bikes on a hot summer day to the Jiffy Food Store, get ourselves Icees, slurping them in the shade while sitting on the sidewalk in front of the store. We played hard all summer long: sandlot baseball, riding bikes, chasing our buddies from one neighborhood to the next.
But we, Jimmy and I, would also ride our bikes to the Altus Public Library. They didn’t have a summer reading program, so Jimmy and I made up our own. We had a competition to see who could read the most books for the summer. Please don’t ask me who won, or how many books we read. It doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that I remember reading through a fourth of the Chip Hilton Sports Series, featuring the central character, Chip Hilton. I spent time imagining I was in a treehouse when I read The Swiss Family Robinson, by David Wyss, and I hurt for Beauty when I read Black Beauty, by Anna Sewall.
That little summer activity set me on a trajectory for learning beyond the nine months designated for school. Reading during the summers opened up new horizons I don’t think I could have envisioned any other way.
Of course, learning includes more than reading. Avenues for self-improvement are as diverse as life itself, for every experience in life viewed from the proper perspective with the right attitude can be a learning process.
Sitting on the front porch, with my arm hanging over Eli’s shoulder, telling him about my summers, I thought of another Billy Graham regret: “Also, I did not spend enough time with my family when they were growing up,” he said. “You cannot recapture those years.”
Like Billy, I, too, “am trying to make it up,” whether school’s in or out.