From Chapter 2 of My Autobiography- Under God's Umbrella

From Under God's Umbrella: A Journey through Life, ISBN: 979-8-8229-0047-9 

An institution that was formative in my growing up years was Kanuga, a church conference center in the mountains of North Carolina near Hendersonville. Our family regularly rented a cabin for a week in the mountains at this beautiful place which Nancy’s and my children and grandchildren all know well. At an exceedingly early age, I remember cane pole fishing with my older brother and father in Kanuga Lake just below Kanuga Lodge. We used poles given to my brother and me by my Aunt Alice (Alice Randolf Hartley Pane, one of my father’s sisters). This was in the early 1950s, and I’m amazed how vivid this memory is to me to this day.

I attended other camps and conferences over the years, but Kanuga was the closest to my heart. I attended the Young People’s Conference for a series of years and eventually worked as a kitchen helper at Kanuga in the summer between my junior and senior years in high school. Interestingly, our son Jimmy also worked in the kitchen at Kanuga between his junior and senior years in high school.

The tradition continued with Nancy and me taking our boys to Kanuga summer after summer. Jimmy and his wife, Caroline, are continuing the tradition to this day, and we have been renting a cabin at Kanuga with them in recent summers. That makes four generations of Hartley's who love Kanuga. Great memories there for us all!

Kanuga became for me what the ancient Celtic church called a “thin place,” which is where the fabric between heaven and earth is drawn so thinly that one can almost reach through and touch the face of God. 

For years, I have used Kanuga as a spiritual retreat. On the far side of the lake sits a bench on the edge of the trail behind the large, iconic Kanuga cross (visible in the picture below). The bench is peacefully and beautifully shrouded in a tunnel of mountain laurel, and it became a special place for me to commune with God and offer up both my joys and struggles.  I have come to call it the "God Bench."

Today, my favorite thing to do at Kanuga is to rise at dawn, walk to the God Bench and visit with the Lord, inviting one of grandsons to come with me; hopefully, I can do the same with Sinclair, my granddaughter, when she is older). Amazingly, my grandsons almost always would say yes to my invitation. My discussions with them in that place have always been deep, insightful, enjoyable, heartwarming, and mostly about God. There is another bench we come to before reaching the God Bench that the grandsons now call the Devil Bench. They throw sticks at it as they run past it to get to the God Bench. There is something delightfully metaphorical about this.  Kanuga will always have a special place in heart because of these times.