In the early 1960s, Howard E. Butt Jr. was both a prominent Texas business executive and a rising star in Christian preaching. On weekdays, he crisscrossed Texas helping to expand H-E-B, the booming family grocery business. On weekends, he traveled to distant U.S. cities as a preacher on the church revival circuit, appearing alongside his friend, the famed evangelist Billy Graham. He had a loving wife and three doting children. He possessed talent, charm, wit and limitless opportunity.
But in retrospect, the most important quality Howard E. Butt Jr. had was a touch of self-awareness. He knew the truth about himself: that he was beset, as he put it, by “all kinds of anxieties and fears.” Butt suffered from a deep and persistent depression. And he knew he needed professional help.
“I couldn’t tell anybody,” he later wrote. “In Baptist or evangelical circles, you didn’t flaunt your relationship with a psychiatrist; you hid it.”
[For more of this story, written by Patton Dodd, go to https://www.washingtonpost.com...p-tens-of-thousands/]
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