Truth teller

Ruth Bell Graham didn’t need handlers or PR experts | Joel Belz

I don't want you to think it was part of a typical morning at work to get a personal phone call from Mrs. Billy Graham. True, she lived just a few minutes down the road and had literally hundreds of friends in our community. But if we had bumped into each other at the grocery store—as had actually happened several years earlier—she wouldn't have known me from Adam.

Now, it turned out, she had read a news feature in WORLD that she didn't think we had gotten quite right. Could I drive out, stop by to see her, and let us talk it over? What she actually asked was whether she could "chew my ear" for a little while.

That was vintage Ruth Bell Graham. She didn't beat around the bush. In this instance, she wanted me to know that our coverage of some aspects of U.S.-Chinese relationships had missed the mark. There were nuances, she said, that we should have picked up on but hadn't. She reminded me that, having been born in China, she had kept her contacts there alive for an entire lifetime. She knew what she was talking about.