Ruth Bell Graham

The woman behind the best-known evangelist of the 20th century.

Ruth bell graham was born in 1920 in Qingjiang, Jiangsu, the second of five children. Her parents, Dr Nelson and Virginia bell, were medical missionaries at love and Mercy Hospital in Tsingkiangpu, China, in the difficult years from 1916 until World War II began.

As she grew up, Ruth had no intention of getting married, much less to a man who would become one of the most famous figures in the world. She had seen missionary family life too close up: the hardship, the loneliness, the danger, as her parents lost colleagues to political violence and Ruth’s little brother to dysentery.

In spite of this environment, laughter and songs rang out from the bell home on the hospital grounds. she and her siblings, Rosa, Virginia and Clayton, learned the basics of Christian faith early through their parents’ example of daily prayer and bible study, in addition to family prayers before breakfast each morning. Ruth could not remember a morning that her father was not reading his bible or kneeling in prayer when she got up.

In addition to their deep spiritual devotion, Ruth also admired her parents’ courage and kindness as they ministered in an often hostile environment. this inspired her to live a life of Christian witness – maybe, she thought, as an ‘old maid missionary’ in Tibet.

at the age of 13 she was enrolled in high school in Pyongyang, Korea, Where she studied for three years and then completed her high school education at Montreat, north Carolina, while her parents were there on furlough.

In keeping with her youthful aspirations, Ruth did indeed lead a life of witness, but certainly not the way she planned. While studying at Wheaton college, she met up with a fellow student, a young baptist preacher called Billy graham. one Sunday morning, she heard him praying during a prayer meeting: “there is a man who knows to whom he is speaking,” she thought.