Like Father, Like Daughter?

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., May 4 (AP) - Thousands watched as Anne Graham Lotz walked confidently in a flowing dress to the center of the arena and opened her Bible.

"Like many of you, my life has been filled with problems and challenges. And ... it has given me just a heart's cry for revival," she said in a firm Southern cadence.

"I have not wanted to escape. And I don't want to quit. I don't want a miracle. I don't even want a vacation. Just give me Jesus, please ..."

With that, evangelist Billy Graham's second daughter launched into her first big-time crusade before an applauding, largely female crowd of 12,500 at the University of Tennessee's Thompson-Boling Arena.

Lotz's "Just Give Me Jesus" tour of free revivals supported by donations and proceeds from book sales continues to Dallas-Fort Worth, then goes on to Atlanta on Aug. 25-26, Kansas City on Sept. 15-16 and San Diego on Oct. 20-21.

"She speaks from the heart and she speaks from the Bible," said Ann Furrow, a friend and one of the organizers of the Knoxville event. "Put that together with her gift as a communicator and there is no question in my mind that this is just the beginning."

Lotz, 51, has come to this point with a mixture of determination and reluctance. She says she was driven by a personal need to be closer to God and to reach others even as some Baptist evangelicals turned their backs on her and as her father's ministry favored her brother, Franklin Graham, Billy's heir-apparent.

"I tend to be a shy person. I am a very private person," she said in a cell phone interview as she drove from her home in Raleigh, N.C., to a mountain retreat before last weekend's revival in Knoxville.

Taking a stage before thousands is something she never expected or planned, Lotz said.

"If God had let me know sooner, I might have backed out on him," she said with a laugh. "But what he did is, he timed it."

Her passion for the Scriptures first caught fire when she saw Cecil B. DeMille's "The King of Kings" on TV one Easter when she was 7 or 8. And it grew as she did with four siblings in the home of America's preacher.

"I feel like it is sort of a trust that God put me in that family, entrusted me with my position in this particular family, and blessed me with it," she said.

Theirs was a genuinely religious home, "not one that just gave lip service to Jesus," she said, and her father brought his global perspective to the grace before dinner.

"You were raised with an awareness of a big world out there ... bigger than just Montreat, N.C., Lotz said of her hometown. The hardest thing about growing up in Billy and Ruth Graham's home was her father's long absences. "All of us adore our Daddy," she said, "but we have only had him a very small part of the time."

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