Well, in honor of the Billy Graham Museum opening in Charlotte, NC today, I thought I would share my story about the day I met Billy Graham in person. (Thank you to those of you who shared your stories here.)

It was 1987, and I was in my first year serving as youth pastor at Calvary Baptist Church, in Burbank CA. This was an interesting position, because at the time, Calvary Baptist was a church without any youth. So, our “youth group” was made up of non-churched teens from the neighborhoods, none of whom had as of yet professed Christ.

I received a call from a woman at Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures telling me about an advanced screening for their new movie, Caught. They were holding the screening at Universal Studios, and she wanted to know if I would bring my youth group to the screening. She told me that they especially wanted the reactions of non-Christians to the movie, and she asked me to encourage my Christian youth to invite their non-Christian friends. I told her I didn’t actually have any Christians in my youth group, but I would ask them to invite their friends anyways.

The night of the screening was a hoot. My friend Martin and I brought eight teen boys from the neighborhood to the screening. Other church youth groups were arriving by bus, dressed nicely for the occasion, walking quietly and politely in groups to the theater. Our guys were all over the place. They were loud and obnoxious, dressed for the street, running pell-mell here and there, excitedly checking out the grounds of Universal Studios after hours. We stuck out like sore thumbs in an elegant hand gallery.

After we finally gathered them all (and got them to put out their cigarettes), we made our way into the screening theater. It was a first-class theater with high-backed chairs that reclined all the way back. Our guys naturally pushed their way to the front of the theater where they proudly sat down front and center in full view of everybody.

One of them asked me where there was a water fountain. So, instead of releasing him now that we finally had them all together and sitting, I told him I would check. I walked up to a man in the back of the theater who looked official to ask him about the water fountain. He turned out to be Bill Brown, the president of World Wide Pictures at the time.

He asked me my name and said, “I have someone I would like you to meet.” Then he tapped the shoulder of a man who was standing with his back towards us and said, “Billy, I would like you to meet Ray.”

Billy turned around, and sure enough, it was Billy Graham. I had no idea he was even going to be there that night and was caught totally off-guard. I think I managed to squeak out something brilliant like, “Hello. Nice to meet you. I’ve heard you speak.”

Billy shook my hand, smiled at me, and, with a twinkle in his eye, nodded towards the front of the theater. “Are those your boys?” he asked.

I looked to the front of the theater where Martin was doing his best to contain eight overly exuberant boys who were rocking all the way back and up again in their high-backed reclining chairs as fast as they could go. They looked like eight alternating levers in some wildy gyrating machine. I said, “Excuse me,” and raced back to the front of the theater where we finally got the boys calmed down in time for the movie.

So that was the one and only time I got to meet Billy Graham in person. I got the impression he was glad that I had brought my wild “youth group” to the screening, and when he came up front after the movie to talk, he smiled at the whole lot of them. Of course, they were completely freaked out to see this man they had only seen on TV before suddenly standing in front of them talking about Christ. All in all it was a great night, and definitely one for the youth pastor books.

Feel free to share any more Billy Graham stories you might have in the comments section!

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• Billy Graham Museum Opens in Charlotte, NC

Mark Roberts reflects on his blog about how easy it is today to find and purchase music from the comfort of your own home, as opposed to the “old way” of going out and buying it in a store. He has some good thoughts on the convenience of technology as well as some of the dangers of instant gratification.

His post reminded me of the Herculean lengths I used to go to find music when I was younger. I spent hours browsing the secondhand record stores, searching for out-of-print treasures like People’s “I Love You” and Larry Norman’s “So Long Ago the Garden.” When my mother went to England to visit relatives, I pleaded with her to try and find the European version of Mark Heard’s “Fingerprint.”

When I was in college, I started listening to Canadian guitarist/songwriter Bruce Cockburn. His most recent material could be tracked down in the states, but you could only find his earlier records in Canada. So, while on a family vacation in northern New Hampshire one summer, I took an all day trek into Canada, stopping at every record store I could find buying up Bruce’s back catalogue. I remember coming back to our cabin in New Hampshire with my arms full of record albums I could not play because we had no record player in the cabin. All week long I studied the album jackets, reading the lyrics and the liner notes, wondering what the music was like. When I got home and put the records on the stereo, I was not disappointed.

I still have all of these treasures on vinyl LP. I eventually ended up re-buying them on CD. The vinyl records are sitting in a cardboard box in the storage closet down in the basement, while their CD counterparts sit proudly upstairs in the living room next to the entertaiment center. And now I could find any of these items online within minutes for either purchase or download.

I like and appreciate the convenience of the internet. I wouldn’t want to go back to the old way of purchasing music anymore than I would want to listen to records on vinyl instead of CD or MP3. But, I have to admit, it was a lot of fun hunting them down the old way. Those are good memories. I wouldn’t trade the internet for the old way, but I wouldn’t trade my memories for the internet either. I just might have to break open that box of vinyl in the basement later today and browse some more liner notes.

Related post: Media Access for the Next Generation

We are blessed to have many forest creatures come visit us from the woods in our backyard. This baby bunny showed up last week and has taken up residence in the black gutter-extension tubing you see in pictures two and three. He is about the size of a chipmunk. We decided to name him Peter. We figure he is a naughty baby rabbit who escaped from his mother and lost his blue jacket on some barbed wire fencing along the way. He is lots of fun to watch out our dining room window while we eat. Heeeeeere’s Peter!

When I was in high school, my friend Andy and I took the train into Boston in the summers to play guitar and banjo duets in the subways. We had a blast playing songs like The Beverly Hillbillies, Duelin’ Banjos and Cripple Creek for early morning commuters. We opened our instrument cases, and people actually threw money in. We usually made about $40-$50 between us, enough to cover our lunch and train fare with some spending money left over.

So I was fascinated to read this article from Sunday’s Washington Post about world class violinist Joshua Bell performing incognito for Washington D.C. Metro commuters at L’Enfant station on the Orange Line. On Friday morning, January 12, 2007, one of the world’s greatest violinists played some of the world’s greatest music on his $3.5 million Stradivarius while over 1,000 people passed by in oblivion.

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Calling all bloggers – I need your help. I just completed my third week of blogging, and find that I am struggling with George Lucas Syndrome.

“What is George Lucas Syndrome?” you ask. George Lucas Syndrome is the compulsive tendency to continue working on projects after you have released them to the general public.

I find that I keep going back to old posts after they have been published and making small changes here and there – tidying up the grammar, reviewing word choice, adding extra ideas that came later.

I am trying to find the happy medium between viewing blogging as a conversation and as a form of written communication. I notice that some high profile bloggers are quite content to leave spelling or grammatical errors or typos or rushed thinking in their posts. This is blogging as conversation. When we talk with someone, we don’t have the luxury of going back and editing our words.

And yet blogging is also written communication, which means that someone may stumble across the conversation weeks or even years after the post was originally published. Should they encounter the conversation as it initially took place, or is it okay to sharpen and clarify your thoughts for future readers?

I would love to get the feedback of some more experienced bloggers here. Do you ever struggle with George Lucas Syndrome?

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For years now my wife, Rose, and I have gone to Cracker Barrel on Friday mornings for breakfast together. This is a tradition that we started back in Florida and have continued since our move to Massachusetts two years ago. We call it our Friday morning Cracker Barrel time. We have had to move it around to different days of the week this past year because Rose has been teaching a class on Friday mornings, but whatever day of the week we go, it is still Friday morning Cracker Barrel to us.

Rose’s class did not meet today, so we actually got to do Friday morning Cracker Barrel on a Friday. It was nice. This is our special time just for us. When we first started doing this we even made a rule, no talking about the kids, but we soon found that this was a good time just to talk about all of life. So we talk about the week, the kids, memories and dreams, whatever comes up. Mostly we just talk.

I love Friday morning Cracker Barrel. Over the years Rose and I have built up a rich storehouse of memories from our Friday morning breakfasts together. We have laughed, we have shared, we have sorted out many problems along the way, and hopefully pre-empted many others. It is one of my favorite times of the whole week.

Oh yes, and the food is good too. Rose gets her cup of coffee, and I get my cup of hot tea. I usually order Uncle Herschel’s breakfast or the Sunrise Sampler, but I was extra hungry today and went for the Country Boy – three eggs over medium, fried apples, hash brown casserole, two English muffins with blackberry jam, and a big old slab of steak cooked medium-well. Hmmmm-mmmm, now that’s breakfast! (I know, now I need to buy some carbon offsets for my meat – see Climate change or diet change? in News and Notes 3/8/2007.)

A thief visited our home in the middle of the night one spring. He came in quietly while we were sleeping, took what he came for, and just as quietly left. The sad thing is we knew he was coming, and yet we did nothing. We were forewarned but made no preparations. If we had only kept watch, we would have been ready for his arrival. The thief’s name was daylight savings time. He came in and stole an hour of our time, and we didn’t even know it. (more…)