Billy Graham — Puddleglum? [Updated]

Earlier this week, The Huffington Post‘s Janet Kinosian interviewed Billy Graham “on death, dying, and faith.” In the interview, Kinosian asked Graham, “Is there one temptation you’ve struggled with throughout your lifetime — one you find yourself confessing to God over and over?” Here was his response:

Ruth and our children used to kid me about being a pessimist, and worrying too much about some situation we might be facing. Sometimes they even called me “Puddleglum,” after one of C. S. Lewis’s imaginary characters in The Chronicles of Narnia who tended to be a pessimist. But their comments had a serious side to them, because they were reminding me that I wasn’t trusting God the way I should. Once we understand that God loves us, we can commit the future into His hands and quit worrying about it all the time.

Click here to read the rest of the interview.

This is not the only connection between Billy Graham and C. S. Lewis. The two met on the campus of Magdalene College at “Cambridge University in 1955, while [Graham] was conducting a mission to students.” In a May 1963 interview with Sherwood E. Wirt of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association [BGEA], Lewis told Wirt that he liked Graham “very much indeed” and called him “a very modest and a very sensible man.”*

There’s a final connection. Both The Marion E. Wade Center [which houses the largest C. S. Lewis collection outside the UK] and The Billy Graham Center are on the campus of Wheaton College (Wheaton, Illinois).

* “Cross-Examination,” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970, 258-67 (265).

UPDATE: I forgot something else that’s pretty important! Both Billy Graham and his deceased wife Ruth Bell Graham (d. 2007) were 1943 graduates of Wheaton College. Click on the links for short biographies of them.