It’s Friday evening, June 24, 2005, a little after six o’clock. One of those beautiful New York summer afternoons. The air is warm, the sky is a brilliant blue, and there’s not a cloud anywhere.
I’m riding the 7 train toward Shea Stadium. Through the window, I watch the rooftops and neighborhoods of Queens roll by. The city moves around me, but my thoughts are somewhere else entirely.
I’m on my way to Billy Graham’s final crusade at Flushing Meadows Corona Park. I’ve never seen the man in person.
I don’t know exactly why, but it feels like I’m heading toward the end of something important. I still can’t quite believe tonight is finally the night.
The rhythm and the back-and-forth swaying of the train pulls me into a slow, hypnotic state, and it carries me back decades. I'm seven years old, sitting on the couch beside Mama. We're watching a Billy Graham crusade on television from Shea Stadium, the very same place I'm riding toward now.
The camera pans across a stadium packed with thousands of people, every walk of life you can imagine. Billy Graham steps forward to give the invitation. His voice is calm and familiar, like he’s speaking to each person one at a time.
“Jesus is calling,” he says. “You come.”
He tells the ones in the back of the stadium not to worry. They’ll wait for them.
“Come. Jesus is calling you tonight.”
People begin streaming down the aisles toward the front. Hundreds of them.
At seven years old, I don’t fully understand everything that’s happening, but I know I’m watching something important.
Mama sits beside me.
Quiet.
Watching.
Believing.
I never once heard Mama describe herself as a woman of great faith. She didn’t have to. She didn’t preach to crowds or stand on a stage.
She simply lived what she believed every single day in the places nobody was filming.
In our kitchen.
Around our table.
In the meals she made and the way she made them.
Billy Graham’s faith filled stadiums.
Mama’s faith filled a home.
The memory fades as the train keeps rolling toward Flushing, Queens and Shea Stadium. I’m not that seven-year-old boy anymore, sitting beside Mama watching a television screen. I’m a grown man, and tonight I’m going to stand in that crowd and see Billy Graham with my own eyes.
The same voice that reached me as a child is about to speak just a few feet away.
I arrive at Flushing Meadows Corona Park, and the crowd is already gathering.
Folding chairs stretch across the field. Conversations drift through the warm evening air.
Somehow, and I still can’t explain how, I make my way all the way to the front row. Unbelievably, I’m just a few feet from center stage and the pulpit. Close enough to see him clearly.
Before Billy Graham comes out, George Beverly Shea walks onto the platform. Billy Graham often said he never opened a crusade until Shea sang. After decades of ministry together, it just wouldn’t have felt right any other way.
Shea begins singing “How Great Thou Art.” The conversations stop. The crowd grows quiet. For a few moments, thousands of people seem to breathe together.
I hear him sing those familiar words, his commanding voice filling the early evening air:
O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder, Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
The song ends.
There is a moment of silence.
Then Billy Graham walks onto the platform.
He’s older now.
Much older.
And frail.
The years of ministry show on him. Early in his message, he smiles and admits that when you haven’t spoken for a while, you lose your touch, and it takes time to get it back.
It’s such an honest thing to say. No pretense. No performance. Just a faithful old servant finishing the work God called him to do.
Then he does what he’s always done.
He opens the Bible.
He preaches Christ.
He gives the invitation; the same one I heard years earlier while sitting beside Mama on our living room couch.
Standing there, just a few feet away, it suddenly hits me. That little boy watching Billy Graham beside his mother could never have imagined he’d one day stand at Billy Graham’s final crusade.
The crusade ends, and I take the short walk back to the train station. But I find myself thinking less about the crowd and more about Mama.
Billy Graham spent his life preaching the Gospel to millions.
Mama never stood behind a pulpit. She never filled a stadium. She never had thousands of people hanging on her every word.
But she lived her faith every day in the quiet places. And I’ve come to believe that kind of faith doesn’t need an audience to change lives.
Most of us will never preach to thousands.
Most of us will never have our names known outside our own hometown.
But every one of us is leaving something behind, whether we realize it or not.
Somewhere along the way, I found myself writing down what Mama left behind, her recipes before they disappeared with time.
At first, I thought I was just writing down recipes.
Looking back now, I realize I was preserving Mama.
I was preserving the Gospel she lived every day.
The kitchen conversations.
The Sunday dinners.
The cast iron skillet on the stove.
The family gathered around the table.
The quiet faith that never asked to be noticed.
The kind of faith that shaped my whole life before I ever realized it was happening.
Billy Graham’s voice reached millions. Mama’s voice reached one family.
Both of them mattered.
Billy Graham preached the Gospel from a stage.
Mama lived the Gospel from a kitchen.
Looking back now, I realize I needed both.
One showed me how to believe.
The other showed me how to live it.
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