Ruth Graham's grandson, Pastor Tullian Tchividjian (New City Presbyterian Church of Margate, Fl) offered the following comment to a post on Justin Taylor's blog, Between Two Worlds:
To summarize what she meant to me and the type of woman she was, I want to share an excerpt from my upcoming book Do I Know God? (Multnomah).
their faces lit up. After giving them both a hug and kiss, I sat down next to Tai Tai. They asked me about Kim, the kids, and the church. I asked them how they were doing.
As we talked, I noticed a large three-ring binder next to my grandmother. The open page contained eight or ten words in extremely large print. I asked her what it was. She told me that because her vision is so bad now, she had asked her assistant to type up all 150 psalms in big, bold letters and put them in three-ring binders. She pointed to her shelf, where there were at least ten more binders containing the rest of the psalms. Every day she sits in bed, incapable of moving on her own, meditating on and memorizing those psalms.
That image, testifying to her passion for God, affected me profoundly. My grandmother is in her late eighties, with severe physical limitations, but she still pursues fellowship with God with every last bit of energy she possesses. Because of her lifelong thirst for God, I consider Tai Tai to be one of the greatest Christians I’ve ever known.
After I kissed my grandmother good night and went to bed, I couldn’t fall asleep. I lay there thinking and praying, “Oh God, I want to desire you the way Tai Tai desires you. I want to experience the same holy passion for you that is so evident in her.”
"When I pulled up to their modest log cabin, my heart started to race. I’ve been visiting my grandparents at their mountain home just outside Asheville, North Carolina, my whole life. But spending time in the home of Billy and Ruth Graham continues to be a powerful experience for me. My grandparents have been walking with God for more than seventy years, and they know him better than anyone else I know. Their simple, single-hearted devotion to their Lord saturates virtually everything they say and do. Every time I spend a few days with them, I leave with a renewed passion to know God the way they do.
I walked through the front door and immediately made my way back to their bedroom, where I knew they were waiting for me. My grandfather sat in a chair next to Tai Tai (it’s what I call my grandmother), who was sitting up in bed. Neither of them gets around well anymore, so they spend most of their days together in their bedroom reading, talking, and praying. When I walked into the bedroom,