The Return of the Family

He heard the voice before he ever pulled the trigger.

On March 15, 1959, a young man stood in a crowd of 143,000 people at the Melbourne Cricket Ground with a homemade gun hidden under his jumper. His name was George Palmer. He led a gang of ten, and he had not come to hear Billy Graham. He had come to kill him. He built ten zip guns, one for each of his boys, and they spaced themselves around the stadium where they could see one another. They had chosen their moment: the appeal. When thousands streamed forward to give their lives to Christ, they would fire.

George had a reason for his hatred. When he was seven, his father planted a hundred cherry trees and then died of a heart attack. George went up to the top paddock and screamed at the sky. He told God he hated Him. He told God he would never love, and for years, he kept that vow. He hadn’t cried since.

So there he stood, gun under his jumper, waiting for the moment to kill.

Then a voice interrupted him.

He looked out at all those people and wondered what on earth they were doing there. As he turned back, the voice spoke. “What are you doing here, George?” He spun around to see who had said it. No one was there. No one he knew. And he got very uncomfortable.

Understand what that voice was. It was not George’s conscience. It was not the mood of the crowd. It was the Holy Spirit of God, moving in on a man who had come to commit murder, asking a question that went straight past the gun and into the wound underneath it. This is the first thing I want you to see, because everything else in this story hangs on it. George did not decide to seek God. God sought him. The Spirit moved first.

What followed was not an argument. It was a conversation. George threw his grief in God’s face. You took my dad. You hurt me so much. Why should I love You? And the Spirit answered him, gently and without flinching: George, I didn’t take your dad to hurt you. I would never hurt you.

That was the moment George began to melt.

The appeal came. The man who had walked in to commit murder set his gun down on the grass and ran to the front. He wept like he hadn’t wept since he was seven. Nine of the ten gave their lives to Christ that night. They stood around afterward, in George’s own words, a blubbering mess, talking about how wrong they had been. Quite a night, he says. Quite a night.

(You can watch the YouTube short of George telling the story here: Former Gangster’s Plot to Kill Billy Graham)

The Voice Is Still Speaking

Here is what I cannot get past. The voice that stopped George Palmer in 1959 has not gone quiet.

That same Spirit is moving right now. Not only in stadiums. In living rooms. In the car that sits too long in the driveway before the door opens. In the silence between two people who used to talk. He is asking the same question He asked George. What are you doing here?

He asks it of the husband halfway out the door. He asks it of the wife who has rehearsed the speech. He asks it of the man convinced he could never love again, the way George was convinced, and when the accusations come, the way they came from George, the Spirit answers the same way. Gently. Without flinching. I would never hurt you.

This is the thread that runs through every restored life and every healed marriage, and it always runs in the same direction. The Spirit speaks. A person accepts the voice and accepts Christ. The heart changes. And only then does the behavior change. You cannot reverse that order. You cannot white-knuckle a marriage back to life by fixing the behavior while the heart stays cold. The family cannot be saved by people who have not first been changed. It begins where it began for George: with the Spirit moving first, and a person choosing to listen.

The Design We Are Returning To

A brother in Christ shared something with me this week. It is called The Family: A Proclamation to the World, published in 1995, in a world that no longer exists. He told me it came from his church. I read it as a man who has watched a culture come apart at the seams.

What strikes me is how little of it needed saying in 1995, and how much of it needs saying now. It proclaims that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan. It says husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children, and it carries a warning that has aged into prophecy: the disintegration of the family would bring calamities upon individuals, communities, and nations.

Read that last line again, then look around.

This is not a small thing, and I will not soften it. The family is not one institution among many. It is God’s design for the very fabric of human civilization. It is the loom on which everything else is woven: how children learn what love is, how a society passes down what it believes, how a people hold together across generations. When the family falls, the civilization frays. Not all at once. Thread by thread, home by home, until a nation forgets what it was made of.

We are living in the fraying the Proclamation foresaw. America needs to be re-awakened to the design, and not only America, but every nation. But here is the order, and it is the same order as George’s. The civilization is not mended by policy first. It is mended by people whose hearts the Spirit has changed, who then honor God’s design for marriage, who then build families that hold. The fabric is rewoven one restored home at a time.

What I’m Proclaiming

So let me make my own proclamation, smaller than the one from 1995, but no less sincere. I want to give whatever time I have left on this earth to serving God by helping to heal and strengthen marriages, and through them, to save the family.

I cannot give anyone the voice that stopped George Palmer. Only the Spirit does that, and He is already doing it. What I can do is point to the path that comes after the voice, because the change of heart is the beginning, not the end. George heard the Spirit in a moment. He served God for the decades that followed. Those decades were built one day at a time.

That is why I keep pointing families to a daily habit. Fifteen minutes a day in God’s Word. It is the unglamorous, sustainable foundation underneath every changed life. The Spirit prompts; then we choose, day after day, whether to feed that prompting or starve it. In my own experience, The Family Wins (TFW) Devotional builds exactly that habit, a few minutes a day, the Word opened and applied, two people growing toward God and, in the process, toward each other. It is not a magic fix. There are none. It is a daily decision, and daily decisions are what marriages are actually made of.

George Palmer set his gun down on the grass and ran to the front. The Spirit moved first. George simply said yes and then kept saying yes every day after.

Your marriage may not feel like a crowd of 143,000. It may feel like two tired people and a quiet house. But the same Spirit is in that house. He is asking the same question He asked George, and He is waiting, with that same gentleness, to answer everything you have to throw at Him.

This is the return of the family. Not a memory of how things used to be, but a homecoming to the design because the Spirit still moves first, and still asks the same question.

Set down whatever you are holding. Run to the front. Then come back tomorrow, and the next day, and feed the good wolf.

If you want help building that new daily habit, I’d like to put a TFW Devotional in your hands. The leather-bound book retails for $39.95, but through MindWolves, your cost is nothing. I set up a safe, secure, and confidential page so you can request yours without a second thought.

Request your complimentary copy here: Complimentary TFW Devotional from MindWolves

“Give, and it will be given to you.” (Luke 6:38)

Feed the Good Wolf. 🐺