Small world indeed!
That church was the old Garr Tabernacle that used to be the Charlotte Civic Auditorium. In 1928-9, Dr. Alfred G. Garr bought the building for scrap and moved it, literally brick by brick, to Tuckasegee Road.
That was a pretty rough area when you hung out there. By the time that I was doing ministry there in 1995, it was over run with crack heads, pimps, and “ladies of the night”.
It is remarkable to me that some of us survived our youth and others that should have did not fair so well. Perhaps God allows for a brief moment of our lives to be lived in the sewer so that we can reach others with our testimonies when we turn it around.
Let me tell you how small the world really is. Dr. Garr, had a son named Alfred Garr Jr.and Alfie, as I knew him, and I went to camp together when I was real young. It was Garr Church’s Camp Lurecrest, sits on the bank of Lake Lure in the mountains.
I have a picture in my book, I kept as a kid, of Alfie on a bunk at the camp.
How small is that?
Also, you are correct, sometimes God lets some of rise out of the muck to tell others not to wade into it. My mother made me understand that when she told me, after I became an adult, that I should have been dead about 8 or 10 times over. One of my best friends didn’t make it out. He was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in a place I had been many times, just a few years prior.
There, but for the Grace of God, go I.