A Young Life Adventure

Eleven months before he died, in January 1970, the entire Young Life staff gathered in California for a staff conference.   Jim was to be one of the featured speakers.   Including spouses, there were almost five hundred in attendance – a far cry from the little group of five men who gathered for the first staff meeting in a Nacogdoches, Texas, church in the fall of 1941.                Everyone at the conference knew that Rayburn was dying and that this would almost certainly be his last time to speak to a staff gathering.                In “From Bondage to Liberty: Dance, Children, Dance” Jim Rayburn III recounts, “Hours before his message, Jim seemed on the edge of dying.   His body wracked by pain, nausea, and radiation sickness, there seemed no way he could speak.   We in the family were most concerned with the consequences if he went ahead.   But there were things he wanted desperately to say, and at 8:00 a.m. Jim stood before ‘his people.’   He was greeted with a sta