As Woody Allen said, the heart wants what it wants. So, why are you here?

I'm getting good at this.

I got a call at lunch yesterday saying, "hey, we're doing a video interview in half an hour. I need you back here right now."

I got back to the church and my boss told me, "I need you to set up a camera, find chairs and build a set, set up lighting for the subject, set up a backscreen, set up a lighting pattern for the backscreen, set up microphones and a mixer, and get the studio soundproofed. We're interviewing Billy Graham's daughter in fifteen minutes."

Fifteen minutes later, when Mrs. Graham arrived, not only was everything done, but I was waiting casually by the door to welcome her in.

For the record, and I think it's safe to say that this comes as no surprise, Ruth Graham is a very sweet, friendly, and intelligent person who was a lot of fun to work with. I kind of feel bad for her, because she's a successful woman in, I would say, her mid-fifties, who leads an extensive Ruth Graham And Friends ministry, and yet our pastor continued to refer to her as "Billy Graham's daughter" for the entire length of his sermon both services, the entirety of which she was seated in the front row. I'm going to assume that's not a one-time thing, too.

I found this quite charming, as well, and I really hope nobody reads into this as me making fun of her, because I honestly find this a nice humanizing quirk from someone in a family that's lauded in the Christian community above all others: the motto of Ruth Graham And Friends is "real answers, for real issues, with real hope, from a real God." Mrs. Graham wrote this motto, placed it in bold typeface on her website, has used it in every intro video that she's recorded (she makes one for each individual church that she visits), and says it aloud every time she's called upon to explain what her conference does. She's also quite incapable of remembering exactly what the motto is, each time she does it.

She starts rolling into it, but she often gets the first one wrong, and pauses for a split second as she tries to figure out whether she's going to back up and start over or not. She usually ends up charging through the rest, and it ends up coming out something like this: "Real questions... for real answers... for real issues... from a real God." And then she just keeps on trucking as if nothing happened, so no one ever ends up noticing. She did it a different way in each of this morning's service, and half a dozen different ways on the video intro she recorded.

I thought it was kind of a neat idiosyncrasy. It's like if Steve Jobs announced at a keynote "once you go Mac you... usually, uh... stick with it."

posted by Ben Wyman @ 5:14 PM