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‘You cannot count your days, but you can make your days count’ — How an aging Billy Graham approached his own death

Related Topics: Billy Graham, Day, Ageing, John Donne

Evangelist Billy Graham tackled the topic of death often and with surprising frankness for a man who made his living telling people the Good News of salvation in Christ.

When Graham preached, he said that death was, of course, inevitable. Since no one knew when Christ would return, he said, people should think instead about the sure thing they did know: the certainty of their own death. While some fundamentalists predicted that some believers would escape death in the rapture, the evangelist repeatedly insisted that death fell on everyone.

In his homily for former President Richard Nixon's funeral, he reminded the family and audience that someday every one of them would die: "John Donne said that there's a democracy about death.