This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

The Michael Berry Show.

Now tonight, I want you to turn with me to the 1002nd Psalm.

The 102nd Psalm.

And a very strange verse in a way, the 5th through the 6th and 7th verses.

I'm like a pelican in the wilderness.

I'm like an owl of the desert.

I watch and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

This week, President Reagan, in his news conference,

declared to the world, you can look pessimistically

on the world today or you can look optimistically. He said, I chose the optimistic look.

And tonight I want to speak on why I am an optimist. And in this passage of scripture, an interesting little story surrounds it.

In 1954, we went England, and we were holding a crusade that lasted three months at the Haringay Arena in London, England.

And my wife is a bookworm, and she loves to go to old bookstores and buy old books

and just browse through old books and she has hundreds of them that she's gotten over the years,

some of the great classics. And on this occasion she saw a little old man in there,

well he wasn't an old man, about a middle-aged man, and he was very discouraged and very despondent looking, and he came up to her and said, are you Mrs. Billy Graham? And she said, yes, I am. He said, well, you know, he said, I'm so discouraged. He said, my marriage is breaking up. And he said, everything is happening to me. I don't know what I'm going to do.

And she said, well, why don't you come out to the harringy arena tonight and hear the gospel?

And she gave him some tickets that she had in her bag. And she didn't see him again. Wondered what

had happened to him. Prayed for him. One year later, we were back in that same city of London holding a crusade at Wembley Stadium,

where incidentally it poured rain every night in the open air like this, except on the last night,

...