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          My name is Chestie A. Carney, named after my uncle Chet, and this is the brief (actually not so brief) story of my life.  I was born in a small town in southern Saskatchewan, Canada. My father, Wilbert Carney, had come to Canada from his hometown in Dickson, Tennessee to look for work in the early 1940's. He found a job as a Pullman porter for the Canadian Pacific Railroad and a few years later he met my mother, Grace Elizabeth Pengelly, a Canadian citizen. A few years later they married and had five children, one girl and four boys, my sister being the oldest and me smack in the middle. We moved from Moose Jaw soon after I was born to Winnipeg, Manitoba. There my father, who had come to know the Lord in Moose Jaw, attended a small evangelical church that greatly inspired him to preach the Gospel. In 1965, following foolowing the Lord's leading, my father quit the railroad and brought the whole family to Nashville, Tennessee,  close to his own birthplace Dickson and the residence of many of his own kin. 
          To make a long story short it went pretty rough for us in Nashville, and by the time I turned 18 things had drastically changed. My mother had found the difficulties to hard and walked out; my father had a nervous breakdown and was in and out of a mental hospital for several years, his faith in the Lord taking a hard hit: and us children, struggling with housing, school, drugs and alcohol desperately tried to make it somehow. After graduation from high school in 1977, I wanted nothing to do with Nashville but to get out..  That chance came with the United States Navy and the September  following graduation  I boarded an airplane for the first time  and headed to Orlando, Florida for 8 weeks of boot camp.  I thought I was headed for a career on the high seas, but God had something a bit different in mind.