Service in the rurals of the mountains in East Tennessee produced some interesting encounters like that you relate. Once, up a two-lane rut road some twenty miles up a hollow from Rogersville, TN, I walked up to the front porch of a cabin, I guess you'd call it, and etched into the glass of the front door was "Jesus Only," and I figured they meant it. So I skulked around to the back door. What was nice about service in the rurals in those parts of the world was that as soon as you announced you wanted to talk about Jesus, you'd get invited to dinner - and they wouldn't let you say no. It was at this house, cabin, that I ran across an old lady, must have been in her 80s, who had never been more than a mile from that cabin and she had been born in it. She had never had been so much as to Rogersville, 20 miles away.
And the poverty! My god in heaven. I've never seen such. And the inbreeding, good gracious. It was something awful. Anyway, there are lots of stories to be told of field service in the Great Smokey Mountains. All of them pathetic in their own way.
francois