Proverbs 31 Woman?

[Sam]

Proverbs 31:10-31 in our Old Testament speaks about a "virtuous" or "diligent" or "excellent" woman (depending on the translation). One study Bible says of this passage, "This poem offers a beautiful description of the excellent wife..." The following article is about the late Ruth Graham and seems to be a modern description of a Proverbs 31 woman.

Ruth Graham; Evangelist's Wife Led Private Crusade
By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 15, 2007

Ruth Bell Graham, who pursued a vigorous if reclusive Christian ministry for six decades in the shadow of her famous husband, the Rev. Billy Graham, died June 14 at her home near Montreat, N.C. She was 87. Mrs. Graham had been bedridden for two years and in recent days had suffered complications from pneumonia.

In the years that Billy Graham, 89, was crusading for God in large tents and advising heads of state throughout the world, Mrs. Graham was talking one-on-one with dope addicts and thugs in stairwells and prisons. Hers remained a more private evangelism.

One key role she played was making sure that Billy Graham became a great evangelist. In the early days, that meant sitting on the floor of their living room clipping news items about cities where her husband was scheduled to preach so he could add local tidbits to his sermons.

In later years, she would tease him out of bouts of depression and keep him true to his preaching mission, advising him to turn down offers from Hollywood and rebuff politicians who encouraged him to run for office. She accompanied Graham on some of his many trips -- reluctantly -- but often managed to slip away to talk Scripture and life with hangers-on who caught her eye.

"Ruth was my life partner, and we were called by God as a team," Billy Graham said yesterday in a statement. "No one else could have borne the load that she carried. . . . My work through the years would have been impossible without her encouragement and support."

Many women of her generation devoted their lives to their husbands, and many lost themselves in the process. Mrs. Graham didn't. From the time she was a child, she enjoyed a rich interior life of faith that enabled her to reach out to those in need and then return to her family, home and writing.

She taught a Bible course at the local Presbyterian college. She oversaw construction of the family home and a 1,500-acre spiritual retreat and training center nearby. She raised five children virtually single-handedly because her husband was frequently on the road. She wrote 14 books of poetry and essays on living a spirit-filled life. And she spent several hours a day reading her Bible.

"She had a faith like nobody I've ever known, more than Dad's," said Ned Graham, the couple's youngest child. "I've never seen it falter." Daughter Ruth cited her mother's "dependence on God in every circumstance, love for His word, concern for others above self and an indomitable spirit."

You had to have an indomitable spirit to survive the 1920s and '30s in Northern China. Ruth Graham was born June 10, 1920, in Jiangsu province in China, the daughter of Nelson Bell, a Presbyterian missionary and surgeon who practiced in a makeshift hospital. Her mother, Virginia, taught her and her sister Rosa to read and write, as civil war raged between Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Party members, bandits killed missionaries at random and impoverished peasants dropped dying babies into a muddy tributary of the Yangtze River that flowed yards away from the Bell home. "The fiber of her being was formed out of watching starvation," said Brenda Josee, an editor who worked with Mrs. Graham on her books.

As a young girl watching her parents toil together in China, she began to envision what it would be like to work alongside a husband on a mission that mattered. She met Graham in 1940 at Wheaton College, a small Christian school near Chicago. To her delight, he was an ordained minister and as serious about God as she was. To her dismay, he was determined to spread the word of God in this country, not overseas.

She wanted to be a missionary in Tibet and held to those plans during a long and rocky courtship. Ultimately, however, she was persuaded to marry him -- and his ministry -- but it was not an easy choice. "After the joy and satisfaction of knowing that I am his by rights and his forever, I will slip into the background," she wrote in her journal, according to the biography "Ruth: A Portrait" (1998) by Patricia Cornwell. "In short, be a lost life. Lost in Bill's."

No one who knew Mrs. Graham would have ever called her lost. She was a finder and restorer of lost souls, including her children. Without a father's regular presence, they gave her fits as they grew up. "Home life was not easy and not always smooth," said William Martin, a sociologist and biographer of Billy Graham.

Ned and his older brother, Franklin, were particularly troublesome, smoking, drinking, racing cars and chasing girls. Mrs. Graham's motherly way, when they dragged home early in the morning, was not to chastise but to let them know that she had stayed up and prayed for them.

"She trusted God would take care of them," said Jean Ford, Billy Graham's sister. All five of Billy and Ruth's children went into some form of ministry, including Franklin, who assumed his father's role as chief executive of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. And all five -- Anne and Virginia as well as Franklin, Ned and Ruth -- were with her when she died, according to an association spokesman. Mrs. Graham is also survived by 19 grandchildren and a number of great-grandchildren.

In the early 1960s, Mrs. Graham took charge of the Sunday school class at Montreat-Anderson College. The college, Cornwell wrote, "was known as the place where you go if you can't go anywhere else. A sizable band of society's rebels, along with those afflicted by academic indolence, landed there."

The students loved their pretty, smart teacher and responded to her social causes, which included helping the poor and running street meetings. The college chaplain asked her at one point whether she wouldn't prefer to spend her free time helping people in the mainstream.

"Well, God loves these people, too," she said. "Just because they're unattractive or warped in their thinking doesn't mean the Lord doesn't love them. And if we don't take them, who is going to take them?" "Her greatest gift was her uncanny ability to be kind without making you feel you needed it," said Cornwell, who, through much of her adolescence, received assistance and love from Mrs. Graham.

Mrs. Graham had a way with spirited people because she was one. Several years ago, while in Milwaukee visiting her grandchildren, she decided she wanted to make the little ones a zip line to swing on. She strung thin wire between two trees 100 feet apart, attached eye hooks to a coat hanger and then to the wire.

She figured she ought to try it out first, and when she did, the wire snapped, sending her sailing and into a hospital with multiple injuries. Those injuries resulted eventually in the osteoarthritis that confined her to bed for the past few years.

She was so spunky that her husband's handlers were never sure whether it was a good thing when she agreed to accompany him on outings. At a political rally in 1975, just as President Gerald Ford was about to speak, she got up from her seat, grabbed a war protester's sign, sat back down and slipped the sign under her white pumps. She told the media, "The man had every right to his opinion. But when the president of the United States is speaking, it is definitely not the place to express his opinion." The protester filed charges against her for assault, and newspapers carried photographs of the Rev. Graham's wife being hauled into court. Charges were dropped after the protester admitted that Mrs. Graham had done nothing but pat his shoulder.

By far, Mrs. Graham's largest undertaking, other than her family, was the creation of the Billy Graham Training Center, known as "the Cove," beginning in 1984.

She worked with architects and construction engineers as classrooms, auditoriums, accommodations and a stone chapel took shape in forests of poplar, locust and Southern pine. It was her wish, stated repeatedly and written in a notarized statement, to be buried at the Cove. Her husband agreed with her until this year, when son Franklin opened a memorial library in Charlotte 100 miles away, near his father's original home.

Franklin suggested that his parents be buried in Charlotte, setting off a fight among the siblings that he appears to have won. This week, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association released a statement saying that Ruth and Billy Graham had agreed to be buried at the new library -- her wish lost in his.