"My Heart is Breaking"
My heart has been breaking. Yes, moving home has been tremendous fun spending more time with family, reconnecting with friends, and starting work at a wonderful church filled with great people. The problem is that while away I seem to have glorified the city of Charlotte in my memory with only childhood experiences from which to draw. Over the last 32 years, I have lived in Davidson, Richmond, Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Atlanta as I circled the southern Appalachian Mountains trying to get back here. Each of those places had things that made them great and had lots of good people. Still, none could live up to Charlotte, my image of the perfect city. It was not long after getting back here that I started hearing over and over about how Charlotte placed 50 th out of the 50 largest US cities in the prospects of upward economic mobility. (Seriously? We couldn’t beat Atlanta? Come on!) Simultaneously, I was becoming aware that I felt like I was now experiencing the most racially segr