For seven years, Julie Mellor left the red New Testament on the top shelf untouched. When the Gideon’s dropped it off in her classroom, Julie was hostile.
“I was an atheist; I didn’t have any time or need for God,” she says on a Jesus Peeps video. “I thought the Gideons were taking up my class time and I thought spreading fairy tales amongst the kids”
Julie, a native of Melbourne, Australia, was a highly educated schoolteacher. She got her Master’s degree from Cambridge University in England.
While she didn’t believe in God, she did explore the New Age Movement.
But then trouble came into her life.
“I went through a traumatic period in my life, and I thought my life was ruined and beyond repair,” she says. “I was actually considering suicide. God I’m going to believe and pray to you for a month, and you got to show me the goods.” Read the rest: Atheist until she read the Gideons Bible.
George Palmer and his boys, armed with concealed zip guns, didn’t go to the Billy Graham crusade to hear him preach. They went to kill him.
Palmer had hated God ever since he lost his father to a heart attack at age seven.
“I was just so angry with God,” he testifies on a Billy Graham Evangelistic Association video on YouTube.
George Palmer’s father died in Western Australia after planting 100 cherry trees. He had a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital, but doctors couldn’t save him.
“I’ll never forget when I was told that my dad had died, I just couldn’t handle that,” George remembers. “I remember going up to the top paddock, and I screamed at God.
“I hate you. I hate you with all my heart. I will never love.”
The anger grew in his heart. He was a troublemaker in school and in the neighborhood. People knew him by his bad reputation and this reinforced his growing bitterness.
“I was always told I would amount to nothing. If you tell a person that continually, that’s what you believe, that you’re worthless, you’re useless.”
In his youth, he led a violent gang that harmed many others and clashed with rivals. “I had a vile temper,” he says.
One day, after beating their rivals in a street fight, George and his nine associates captured the rival gang leader and, subduing him, drove a car over his hand backwards and forwards, crushing every bone in his hand.
“It’s all I ever thought of, hurting people,” he says.
They planned to attend the crusade in Melbourne, determined to kill the internationally famous evangelist.
That’s when he and his boys heard that Billy Graham was coming in 1959 to preach across Australia. They hated Christianity and God.
“Billy Graham stood for something I detested,” George says. “It was something that drove me day by day.”
“I made up 10 zip guns, so each member had one of those,” he says. “I said to the guys, ‘Come on. We’re going on the green. We spaced ourselves so that we could see each other around where Billy Graham was preaching.
“We decided that…during the appeal, we would kill Billy Graham.”
Mustard Seed Budget 