Two-year-old Nathan was talking on the telephone to his Aunt Peggy. With animated face and dramatics, he described his new ball, then ran to get it for her.

Holding the ball up to the phone, Nathan asked, “See?”

“No,” she replied.

Pioneer in Christian Education

During a period just prior to his highly successful Los Angeles crusade in 1949, Billy Graham was being challenged by one of his closest friends to accept a liberal view of the Bible. Graham desperately cried out to God under an August moon at a mountain retreat. Help came in the person of Henrietta Mears, a pioneer in Christian education at Hollywood First Presbyterian Church.

“She had faith in the integrity of the Scriptures and an understanding of Bible truth as well as modern scholarship,” Graham recalled recently in his autobiography.

Although many people have no sympathy for those on San Quentin’s death row, Josie Smith prays that these condemned men will know the love of God.

When Josie was a college student back in 1949, she felt a specific call to become a missionary. Little did she know how God would choose to use her.

Her interest in prison ministry began years ago when she and her husband, Dan, operated a home for delinquent boys called Outreach for Youth. It wasn’t long before parents and friends of incarcerated men began calling and writing, asking the Smiths to contact a friend or relative.

Amid incredible loss, you can still trust God to bring good out of every situation. I know because he did it for our family.

The start of the year 1999 crackled with excitement. God’s blessings and promises to our family seemed so near, we could almost reach out and touch them. In 1998 we had traveled and ministered together in churches around the country–Harry and I preaching as a team and our three children, Harry III, Roman and Gabrielle, singing, laying hands on the sick, and ministering in the services. Many people told us we had the most unique ministry to families they had ever experienced.

Now we were entering a new year and a new level of ministry. Our travel calendar for 1999 was booked solid. We were scheduled to take God’s message of love and hope to more people in more places than ever before.

It was impossible to accept, but now the glaring evidence was undeniable. My husband of more than 25 years had been unfaithful to me for a long time.

A chill crept over me as I stared at the computer screen in disbelief. I struggled to comprehend the e-mail I had just opened. It was clearly a love letter, and its contents made it obvious the writer and addressee had been intimate over a long period of time. The incomprehensible part: This e-mail was signed by my husband–and it was not addressed to me.

The e-mail explained why, 10 days before, our lives had taken a devastating turn. We had spent a beautiful, sunny January day picnicking at a riverside park with our son. Later, after Trevor* had run off to play at a neighbor’s and I had started cooking dinner, my husband, George*, appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, suitcase in hand.

After living to-gether for nearly two years, my husband and I were married in 1980. A few years before, my mother was born again and began praying for my salvation.

Not long after her own encounter with God, my mother led me to the Lord. At 22, I was a new wife, a new Christian and a new mother. I was also a student–learning to walk with God and reading the Bible for the first time in my life.

My husband was not influenced by my conversion, however. He didn’t want anything to do with the things of God. But his disinterest did not prevent me from standing on the Word of God for his salvation.