To the Limit: A brief memoir by Chas Carrin

But there were frightening moments as well. Once I was caught in street fighting in Jerusalem and had to hide in a battened-down Muslim shop until the gunfire ceased. Another time I was attacked by a gang of screaming, rock-throwing Muslim boys at the Dome of the Rock. In the Aegean Sea, my ship was caught in a violent week-long storm that sent the ship’s cargo and passengers slamming against the walls. Furniture overturned, dishes crashed out of the cabinets, and there was horrendous seasickness. My porthole broke open and seawater shot into the cabin. I was too seasick to do anything but reach the steward’s call-button with my toe. He rushed in, stuffed a pillow into the porthole and rushed out. The next wave knocked the pillow to the center of the room with a spray of water following it.

Another time in Turkey a cholera-epidemic forced everyone to receive emergency inoculations. I was more afraid of the unsanitary conditions of the makeshift “clinic” than I was the cholera. But I had to take the shot anyway. Later, a ship I had been on was bombed and sunk by terrorists in Lebanon. In Beirut, my guide suddenly abandoned me one night in a darkened alley in the Muslim quarter of the city. I had no light and no way to get back to safety except to slide my hand along the sheer, stone wall of a long, descending staircase where vagrants were sleeping. Had I stepped on one in the dark it would have disaster for me. At war zones in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I was close enough to the fighting to see truckloads of bodies being hauled away. Legs of the dead stuck out the tailgates. Roadblocks and sub-machine guns stopped our vehicle repeatedly. Just before my arrival, an enemy soldier had been captured and was dragged through the town alive with his feet tied to the bumper of a speeding truck. Afterward he was beheaded and his body thrown in the river. We Americans know so little of the pain other nations endure. It was also in that African village I had my first taste of monkey meat.

On a crowded native bus in South America, going up a steep, 10,000 feet high mountain road, an old man near me became motion-sick. Without warning he leaped to his feet, his nausea exploded, and I was covered with the spray. Everyone laughed. The old man felt better. But I felt horrible and when we finally got to the top of the mountain I was more sick than he. –God never promised us sanitary conditions. There were other trips to Central and South America with my wonderful helper, David Rhea. At a meeting in Peru we saw a well-dressed, handsome young man charge onto the platform wanting deliverance from drug addiction. And he got it! With a wild, frenzied roar the demon came out of him. It took four strong men to restrain the youth and hold him to the floor. When he rose to his feet he was free! At four o’clock the next morning he was waiting in the airport balcony to wave goodbye as we left, shouting “Papa! Papa! Yo te amo! Yo te amo!”–“Papa, Papa, I love you! I love you!”

While receiving hands-on ministry I have seen literally thousands like this young man crash to the floor and undergo the exorcizing power of God.

An atheist PhD college professor crashed to the floor, came up sobbing, saved, and saying “I found God! I found God!”

In the 1980’s I met Jack Taylor. We instantly bonded and he began opening more doors of opportunity for me. Jack is the former Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention and well known across America. Through him I met other great pastors and churches. R.T. Kendall, then pastor at Westminster Chapel, London, stepped into my life. We met at a Conference in Tennessee and he soon invited me to preach at the Chapel in London. The Holy Spirit came into that historic church in an astonishing way and the floor was quickly covered with people fallen under the power of God. More importantly, they rose with the anointing of the Holy Spirit upon them. R.T. later wrote, “Charles turned us upside-down … He left a deposit of glory and of the presence of God that has made us a Spirit church as well as a Word church.”

Tags: carrin, chas, limit, memoir

Category: Living the Faith, Spring 2019