During his first year at Florida Bible Institute he fell in love with an attractive, dark-haired young woman. In 1938, he asked her to marry him. She accepted, only to reject him the following year because she was in love with someone else. It was a sharp blow, and Billy begged God to change what had happened, to somehow reverse the inclinations of her heart or of his.
But prayer, he discovered, was not a wish-book filled with slick promises of happiness and plenty; he learned that God often did not give him what he wanted because He'd rather give him what he should have.
In his greatest hour of dejection, he gave what was left of himself to all that he conceived of God.
Patricia Daniels Cornwell, A Time For Remembering: The Ruth Bell Graham Story (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), 58.
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