I’m CSPC member Charlotte Womack, and this is how I’m living deeply. 

“In the 1960s, my husband Jim and I relocated in Bearden. That was when a friend told us about ‘a little church way out on Kingston Pike,’ and after our first visit, we were ready to join CSPC. Our three sons were raised in this church. From infancy, each of them was sitting under great, Biblical teaching. (Because of our church family, we heard about Christian higher education- and our three sons all went on to graduate from good Christian colleges.) Of course, in my 60-plus years here we have had many pastors. Each was chosen by the Lord, with gifts especially suited to the period during which he taught us. I have been in the same Sunday School class with close friends since some of us were young, then middle aged, and now we have grown old together. Our dear church family has been an amazing support through the deaths of a grandson and my husband, and a comfort to me as I sold my home and moved to an assisted living facility. One of our dear CSPC staff pastors even comes to my assisted living facility and conducts a communion service every three months! The Lord wants to take us deeper in our journey through life- and the body in Christ at CSPC has been an indispensable comfort, encouragement, and support in that journey for me. Let me share with you some of the most pivotal parts of my path, and the treasures God revealed to me through them.

Over my long life, one defining moment really sticks out as deepening my walk with God the most. As I mentioned, we had three sons, and Jim and I were determined to send them to Christian colleges: Wheaton, Covenant, Montreat. It was a luxury, and we knew it, but it mattered to us. I had stopped my job teaching school, which meant giving up a second income entirely. We felt we were following the Lord’s call, and trusting Him to provide without that extra money coming in. Then Jim’s job disappeared. All at once, we had sons in college, and no income at all. None. We were pretty well drained out financially, you can imagine. So we did the only thing we knew to do. We gathered around our coffee table as a family, got down on our knees, and one by one, out loud, we prayed for jobs. That was our Ebenezer. And within three or four months, the Lord provided- not just scholarships for the boys, but work for Jim, and it turned into the best season of his career. He became an environmental engineer with NOAA, the government weather & climate study service. After he retired, his experience with NOAA led the U.S. government to appoint Jim to a special role in Hungary helping the country recover from pollution-related issues after the Communists moved out. Jim spent months studying how the U.S. could help Hungarians restore what had been lost: national monuments black with soot from decades of neglect, stained-glass windows in old churches so covered in grime you couldn’t see the light through them. People hadn’t even been allowed to worship. I remember later hearing of little churches reopening, shops springing back up, a whole nation quietly coming back to life. And I thought, ‘That all traces back to a coffee table in Knoxville, and a family with nothing left but a decision to kneel down and ask God for help.’ I think every family has a crisis point like that. Ours had to do with money. But what I learned that year has never left me: I have nothing to fear in the future. Not because nothing hard will happen again, but because I know, absolutely, God’s never once failed to be there walking us through those times of crisis.

That trial taught me I really could trust God with whatever’s in front of me, and I’ve tried to spend my life living out that truth. I had providentially known the founder of what became Bible Study Fellowship (BSF), who always told us, ‘Ladies, you need to start your morning every day by talking with the Lord. Get your cup of coffee, get into your Bible, and get into prayer.’ Because of the home I grew up in, that sounded familiar! I was around 50 years old at the time, and the BSF material was making an impact on me. I was telling a friend about all it, and she insisted, ‘Charlotte, you’ve got to bring this to Knoxville.’ We didn’t have BSF classes here yet. So I trained, came home, and started praying with five other women that God would give us a church in Knoxville willing to host us. A little Baptist church on Kingston Pike said yes, and from there it grew- eventually into Second Presbyterian as the host church, with teaching leaders and classes spreading all over the city. I taught BSF for years, until I was in my 70s. By that time, there were plenty of hands to carry it without me, and BSF is still strengthening believers around Knoxville today. That wasn’t the only new work where God let me in on the ground floor. I also helped start something smaller but just as close to my heart: a weekday kindergarten right here at CSPC. We only ever had two little classes, but I directed it for four years, working through every state rule and requirement to keep those five-year-olds learning together during the week. It closed eventually, once the city schools caught up with good kindergartens of their own. But I like to think of it as the small seed that grew into the Weekday School the church runs today. None of this was anything I ever planned. But I’ve found that’s how the Lord tends to work. He doesn’t just answer the prayer in front of you: He’s often planting something else through your faithful trust and obedience, too.

Not every chapter has been an easy one to tell. A few years ago, I lost a grandson. Ian was tall, six-foot-three, sharp as anything, the kind of young man who lit up a room. His father -one of my three sons- worked for a Christian ministry and never made much money. So, unlike his uncles who’d gone off to places like Wheaton and Covenant a generation before, Ian couldn’t afford a Christian college. He married his high school sweetheart (the only girl he ever loved), had a child, and went straight to work instead. Life as a young adult got hard for him in ways I don’t need to go into, and he died suddenly- far too young, in this grandmother’s eyes. I think about that sometimes- how the same prayers that opened doors for his uncles didn’t open that door for him. I don’t have a tidy answer for that- we don’t always get those as we walk along the path of faith. Of course, over my long life, I’ve buried a lot of people I loved. I had a dear friend from my InterVarsity days, a woman I was as close to as a sister. When she died, they found her in bed in her nightgown, gone peacefully in her sleep. I remember thinking, ‘Isn’t that a beautiful thing?’ That wasn’t how it went for Ian, and that difference is part of what made losing him the hardest thing I’ve ever carried. I also found myself sitting with an unsettling question: Does the manner of a death change what grace can reach? My mind went back to an argument I once had with a preacher who believed you had to confess every sin before you died, or you were in trouble. I told him very directly, ‘You’re the one in trouble, carrying a burden like that. None of us know all our sin.’ And that’s the truth. We die with things unconfessed every single day, whether we go quietly in our sleep or not. I needed that reminder. Ian loved the Lord- that didn’t get erased by his story’s sudden ending. As Psalm 103, which my mother read to me when I was young, says: ‘He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust.’ I’ve turned that over more since Ian’s death. We are dust, all of us, and God knows it, and He loves us anyway. That’s not just something I say to comfort myself- that’s the whole Gospel.

Embracing God’s peace by trusting Him is something you have to keep doing over and over your whole life. I gave up my home four years ago, once I couldn’t drive anymore, and moved into an assisted living center. (I didn’t want my sons worrying over me from three different states!) It turned out to be a wonderful decision. About 50 of us eat together in the dining room -several of us from CSPC- and we’ve mostly all learned to get along by learning to put up with each other. We have hymn sings and Bible studies, even bingo. I wake up happy nearly every morning, starting each day the same as I have for decades: coffee first, then a little Bible reading, then talking with the Lord before the day really starts. I’ve never once outgrown needing that. Jim’s been gone 11 years now. I met him when I was 16, and he was the only person I ever conceived of loving. It’s still a grief. But I have the hope, the promise, that I’ll see him again. I had a couple of aunts who lived to be 93- wonderful, happy women, full of fun. Right up until their husbands died. Then they went gloomy, sat around talking about the old days like there was nothing good to look forward to. I watched that happen to them and told myself: ‘I don’t want to live old like that. I don’t want to be a bad example to the people coming behind me.’ So I still make it to church most Sundays -friends bring me right to the door- and I still enjoy Bible study and fellowship with my Speak Out Sunday school class; down to 20 of us now, all grown old together. I’m told I’m the oldest member who still comes regularly. My pacemaker stopped working six years ago, and my doctor just left it in- I Googled it, and it won’t hurt anything. (Maybe the problem of my heart skipping beats just cured itself during the years that it worked!) I pray for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren every single day. And when my own time comes, I’d like to just go to sleep one night and wake up in Heaven. But however it happens, I’m not afraid. I haven’t been- ever since a time of prayer around a coffee table, a long time ago, taught me I never had reason to be.”