You Are Here By No Coincidence
Forgive me for starting another blog with a personal story. It’s not narcissism that provokes me, I promise…It’s God. Using personal history to reveal purpose through the lens of lived experience—through my eyes.
God Has Purpose...
(Starting in Detroit)
I once lived for a short time in a tenement building in inner-city Detroit. I was just a young child—too young to understand much of anything.
My father, two brothers, and I shared a small, cramped space.
I can remember fire escapes down the back side of each tenement—hanging like skeletons on cracked brick walls. They faced an inner common space between the buildings: with some sparse grass, but mostly broken concrete walkways, and empty echoes.
Those were my preschool years. Living with a father I didn’t know. Waiting to be returned to a mother who didn’t want us.
Then the courts stepped in...
They split us apart—my brothers and me—placing us into different corners of the foster care system, like loose change scattered in a drawer. Bounced around like pinballs in a machine designed more to manage problems than to heal children.
There were no roots. No permanence. No sense of home, just movement, and just survival.
Between the ages of four and sixteen, I lived in twenty-one different foster homes. Let that sink in: Twenty-one.
Each move left a mark. Each house reminded me that we were temporary… and unwanted.
My brothers were placed in state-run homes for children. But they weren’t homes—not in any meaningful sense. They were clinical in nature, industrial homes, cold, loveless and unstable.
It’s no surprise that my brothers turned to the drugs and alcohol that flooded the streets in the late ’60s and early ’70s. It’s a tragedy they never escaped.
Gary died in 1974. Donnie, more recently...But here I am. Still alive, the youngest, the most vulnerable, the most likely to fall. And yet, I didn’t. Not because I was better, or stronger, or smarter. But because God’s hand was on me, even when I didn’t know it.
A Devine Intersection...
At the age of sixteen, after moving from Michigan to Niles, Ohio, and into my twenty-second home, I received the Holy Ghost and was baptized in Jesus’ name at East Park. Praise God!!
Yes, God Has Purpose...
I am convinced that God assigned purpose to my life from the beginning—From my birth at Ascension St. John Hospital in Detroit, To this very moment. Right here, right now.
And if you’re reading this, I want to tell you something clearly:
You Are Here By No Coincidence...
God doesn’t do random. He doesn’t misplace people. He doesn’t forget stories. You may not see it now, But He has a plan for you—just like He had one for me. Do you understand that?
Don’t waste your life running. Don’t let pain harden your heart. And don’t fall for the lie that your life doesn’t matter.
Because there is an enemy...
And yes, I’ll say it plainly: He wants you dead.
He wants you to die in the wilderness—unrepentant, unhealed, and unfulfilled.
But God has bigger plans...
Plans of hope. Plans of redemption. Plans of coming home. So if you’re reading this, it’s no accident. God is giving you another chance.
Don’t waste it. Because…
You Are Here By No Coincidence!!
~ Brother John Tarter