Billy Graham, Prince Albert, and Two Lives Changed Forever

A personal story about a hero who changes lives forever.

If anything is clear from Jesus’ teaching, it is that the Kingdom of God is not at all complicated. In order to participate in the counter-culture Kingdom, we must simply, yet wholeheartedly, trust that the entire realm is dependent upon a lone Sovereign God.

This King has no need for the business that I can deliver, nor is it held hostage to the proper execution of the most brilliant strategic thinking that I can muster.

He requires only one simple course of action: trust.

That action happens to be the only fitting response of a subject to his sovereign.

Affronting as it might seem to all the clever inventions of humanity, Jesus asks only for our allegiance. In that humbling weakness, he assumes the entirety of the responsibility for his plans and does what he wishes with our mustard seed participation.

God takes that inconsequential seed and carefully places it in the fertile soil of his providential desire. Taking on himself the task of master planner, God creates the most intricate garden that bears his image of eternity as its blueprint.

From our fallen stations on earth, we seldom have eyes to see the wonders that God performs with our tiny mustard seed. That humbling and astounding revelation awaits the Christ-follower in heaven.

But from time to time, God’s grace allows us to take a little peek. And these are amazing moments.

As we begin a new year and a new decade, let me share one of these moments. It is a very personal story that profoundly illustrates this great truth.

My parents, Allan and Helen Christopherson, were married on June 4, 1960, in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Canada. They soon began a family with the birth of their first child, a little blonde haired and blue-eyed girl named Cathy. Three years ...