Childhood
Charles Hadley Stevens was born on January 10, 1892, to David Samuel and Mary Holt Stevens. Wilson’s Mill, North Carolina, was their home until his family moved to Durham, North Carolina, when he was three and two years later to Greensboro, North Carolina. Before his eighth birthday, Charles found himself hard at work in a textile mill to help supplement his family’s income. It was during this time that Mary Stevens, Charles’ mother, died. His mother was spiritually instrumental in those early years of his life. She read Foster’s Story of the Bible to her children. Charles later said that he “believed God called him into the ministry when he was three years old,” in part, due to these readings. However, he did not have a “definite conversion experience” until several years later.
A year after his mother’s death David Stevens once again moved his family. This time it was back to Wilson’s Mill, North Carolina. Buies Creek Academy is where, during this time, Charles Stevens began his first schooling. After only a year and half, Charles was prepared for college. He then enrolled at Wake Forest University. Here he was honored in his studies, ran track, and became “convinced of the Lord’s call to Christian service," according to professor William Thompson.
Read more about this topic: Charles Stevens (pastor)
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime. A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)