* the Bishop’s socks

When I was a lot younger than today, one of my friends who worked for Billy Graham (BG) back then, processing gifts that were sent to him, told me about a lady who had sent BG a pair of socks, asking if BG could wear them while he was preaching in his upcoming Crusade in her city?

Some years later, when I was still quite young, the Bishop (think President in a Lutheran sort of way) of the ELCA (the Lutheran church we were members of and working for as missionaries at that time) had lunch with us one day. Now this would have been a very unusual event, except that my wife (and to a much lesser extent, I) ran the ELCA missionary guest house in Antananarivo, Madagascar, at the time, and he and his party were staying at it during a visit they were making to visit the Malagasy Lutheran Church. They had just flown into Madagascar from the US on a series of very long flights, so were exhausted, and to top it off, they had just found out that somewhere along the way someone had stolen all of the Bishop’s socks, which had been in an outer pocket of his suitcase. So they were asking us where they might be able to buy some new ones to replace the ones he’d lost? The answer was simple–there weren’t any stores that had his size in our city. So I got some of mine for him as our feet were about the same size (if I recall all I had were white athletic socks, as I didn’t use dark socks back in those days–OK, so I’m not a fashionista!).

Trying to be funny, as I handed my socks to the Bishop, I told him the above story regarding Billy Graham’s gift of socks, asking him if he could wear my socks during his visit to Madagascar?

He didn’t laugh. At all.

Not my finest hour.