Patterns in the Chaos

I had always had a suspicion that God was out there somewhere, waiting to zap me. But when it happened it was not the terrifying thing I had supposed. It was more like stepping through a curtain and finding myself in another world, a vast alternate reality that had always been there behind the veil; A magical vista that was both new and revolutionary and yet, at the same time, as old and dependable as the hills…
After ELO played its last gig in 1986, I had busied myself with various musical projects and in 1987, I got involved in writing and recording the soundtrack for a Hollywood film. It sounds great, but it turned into an epic bad experience for me. In a word, it was horrible - the film was horrible, the people were horrible, I was horrible! - And to cap it all, I didn't get paid for it! I came away with a cartload of bitterness toward the man who'd hired me.

It was June 1988, I still hadn't been paid for the film and my blood boiled whenever I thought about it.
By now mom was disabled, living in a home and wheelchair bound. She asked me to take her to a church that was just around the corner from where she lived.
So, off we went: I remember everyone looked so infuriatingly blissful as I wheeled her into the Cadbury Hall in Selly Oak, Birmingham, that evening. I thought: 'Boy, what are these guys on?'

After some energetic singing, the pastor got up and announced:
'Tonight my sermon is on disappointment!'. I gasped. Straight away he got my attention - I was the authority on the subject that night, it was oozing out of me. I was so bitterly disappointed with everything, and most of all, with myself. I had always thought that I could work it out - that no matter what, somewhere I had the resources to sort out my own life. That night I was prepared to accept the fact that I couldn't. I had proved it again and again, I was hopeless at it!

The Pastor - Dave Woodfield - launched into his sermon. I remember it was really good, and I was glued to his words (after all it was my subject!) But as I sat there listening the weirdest thing began happening - Somebody else starting speaking to me! Behind Pastor Dave's words there was another discourse going on - like a sub text. It wasn't like a 'mind dialogue' at all, but quite different. It was something outside of me speaking forcefully right into the very centre. I say 'speaking' but it wasn't in distinct 'words', yet I could understand the meaning. I knew what the message was - I heard it loud and clear:
"You've been angry at me for years… You've been running away…. Ever since your dad died!"
In an instant I came face to face with the Creator God, and I was scared. A powerful force was prising me open and reaching into a place deep inside… a place full of secrets, things that nobody but me and God could possibly know about!
In that moment I felt my whole self rise up like some incandescent ethereal ghost. I squirmed as a huge spotlight was turned on me and I was suspended there, dangling before everyone. I was stark naked and every eye in that building was looking at me! My shame filled the place and for an instant, I was helpless with trepidation:
('How did He know all this about me - How did He know where to find me - How…??')
I don't know how long it was but I remember the thought coming. I remember the fear turning to awe, to wonder and then to peace. It came like a homing beacon, a wonderful thought. It was simply this: 'Why should He bother? Why should the Almighty bother to come to Selly Oak, Birmingham, to speak with David Morgan about this?' There was only one answer: Love.

The Pastor's words faded back into my world - he was winding up his sermon: 'Friends will disappoint you, business associates will disappoint you, I will disappoint you, but Jesus will never disappoint you.'
I made a decision that night. There were no big flashes and I didn't feel so very different. Pastor Dave said at the end of his sermon: 'Put your hand up if you want to make a commitment', and my arm rose as if all by itself. Someone came to me and took me for a moment of quiet prayer out in the foyer. Really I doubted that things could change just because I'd said a few words asking Jesus into my life. But they did....

Driving home from the church, a voice spoke clearly into my mind. This time it was in distinct words. It simply said: 'You won't swear any more'. (It wasn't like a threat, more like a statement of fact).
And that was it. I didn't have to think about it, or try even, I just stopped swearing!
Before that, I was unable to put a sentence together without lacing it liberally with profanities.
All my friends noticed: "Dave, you're talking different!"

It was a turning point for me, a point of reference, like the day the years changed from BC into AD.
I embarked upon a journey that was not to be without obstacles and yet was the most wonderful journey of all. God had supernaturally intervened in my life in a forceful personal way. He came and confronted me with an issue that I had not mentioned to another living soul. In fact, I didn't even know until that night that it is possible to be 'mad' at God, but it is.

Over the following months, Pastor Dave and I slowly became friends. In fact over the years he was to become an indispensable ally and source of good counsel to me. Now he has moved up the ecclesiastical ladder to be in charge of many churches, and me - well now I am a preacher and pastor myself. But that didn't just 'happen' - there was a lot of kicking and screaming first….

Diamonds and unexploded bombs
It was late in 1988 that I felt the Lord wanted me to write songs for him (and mom, and everyone at church kept nagging me as well!). But I just couldn't do it, I tried and tried but nothing came out. I thought 'I just can't do this!'
I had a complete block about it, until one day - when I was out walking the dog, I came upon a soggy pamphlet lying on the pavement. It had 'GOD' in big red block letters on its cover. I bent down and picked it up, took it home and dried it out, opened it with curiosity, and read inside... As I read that little pamphlet, the words and music to 'Outside Jerusalem' came to me. It was as if it had just wafted up off the paper into my mind, and before many minutes I had written my first God song!

I couldn't help but recall that piece of paper that dad had picked up off New Street all those years ago and its terrible message. It's funny, the things you stumble on lying in the street. Some can be like diamonds and some, like unexploded bombs. The first had been to me, a bomb that couldn't be defused, and the second, simply a diamond, a gift when I needed it. Both came with the teaching that God is able to speak through anything, even something so bizarre as a scrap of paper.

Relations with mom slowly turned around - I don't know when or how exactly, but slowly we became the best of pals! All the past hurts were healed - changed even; Things that had seemed so bad years ago became things that I could actually be thankful for! The way she had looked after her brother Joe, and later married Alf - I came to see both in a new light. Mom's actions, which had seemed to so wound me then, claimed fresh significance and respect. That, and the way she would always speak words of faith and hope to people made me glad to be called 'Vinnies' son'. Instead of hating her for her idiosyncrasies, I was proud of her. I didn't know it then but God so arranged it that before she died, mom was my best friend and I was her best friend.
It is something I can never stop feeling grateful for.

Yes there was some mighty alchemy performed. Structural engineering work, refurbishments and re-decorating. There had to be, to restore things to their rightful place.
Yes, becoming a Christian was for me, something akin to stepping out of the Gulag into Disneyland. It was like hearing every Beatle song at once, before they were ever famous! It was every bit as exciting as being on tour with ELO. I was entering upon an epoch of pure unadulterated joy.

Science calls it Epiphany (it always has a name for everything) and I emigrated from the land of cacophony into the land of epiphany in one sudden leap that evening in June 1988.
I can only compare it with being in love.
I have heard it said that we all walk around with a God-shaped void inside us, and that life is but a trek to discover the way to fill that void. Meeting God resolved many things for me, brought questions and important issues to a place of rest. It raked in the dead leaves of confusion and cynicism, of forever chasing the vanity of 'proof' and certainty. For the principles of cause and effect have to take on a different significance when you bring God into the equation….

 
4 Aug 90, being baptised by assistant pastor Vic Nicolls (left) and Pastor Dave Woodfield. 

 
Pastor Dave Woodfield records one of the weekly 'Faith Walk' radio programmes at Grimm Doo, 1992. 

It was early one July morning in 1990 when we crossed the border into Romania. It took ages for our convoy of one old coach and two vans to get through the frontier from Hungary but that was the norm. There were hundreds of others queuing in cars, lorries and buses, just the same.
The Communists had collapsed just seven months before in a popular uprising that had seen its leader and his wife shot in the courtyard of a military barracks.
Ceaucescu had been the absolute ruler of Romania, a modern day Pharaoh whose every whim was law. Life and death had flowed from him and his ruling clique as casually as a puff of wind, to be implemented by an army of lieutenants, each exercised by a level of fear from the next above. The only luxury was to be at some lesser station of oppression than somebody else. It was a system designed to grind the spirit of man to dust.

George Orwell never visited the place, yet he had described it to a tee. As we drove deeper into Romania, I soon began to feel like Winston Smith in Orwell's book 'Nineteen Eighty Four.' A piece of ash trapped in the furnace of blatant, all-encompassing madness.
O'Brien said to Winston: 'How many fingers am I holding up?' (he holds four).
'Four?'
'No, if the party says I am holding up five fingers, you must answer five, Winston.'

I was in the workers' paradise.
Oh boy, did I have to eat my words! I had often speculated that 'things aren't so bad behind the iron curtain' - thinking that we were victims to some measure of our own western propaganda. But I was wrong. Things…. big things, little things and all the in-between things, were immeasurably worse than I had imagined.
'Don't show me any purity' Winston said to his girl-friend Julia, 'I just want to do it' (to have sex)…
Don't talk of beauty or virtue or anything like that, don't talk about that rubbish because this place could not exist if those things existed….
Romania was like a gigantic slave-labour camp, a multi-storey version of 'Schindler's List', an outpost of what President Reagan had accurately described as the 'Evil Empire.'

By July 1990 the monster that communism had created was still tottering along with the same old blood in its veins, stumbling in search of a transfusion that had to come from outside. And there we were, in an envious situation, foreigners on a coach, with tea and biscuits, and the ability to leave…

Gypsy convoy: On the road to Romania - our old charabanc and behind two vans.

Hands across the wall  --->:
Outside Ceaucescu's massive Palace in the Romanian capital Bucharest, July 1990.

Pipeland
Soon after crossing the border we drove into the city of Oradea. It announced itself long before we ever reached it by a massive industrial plant stretching for miles along one side of the road. I looked out at a moving mural of shattered buildings - abandoned and vandalised I thought. Pipe-work exuded from everywhere. It was surreal, a gigantic Mad-Max science-fiction film set. The pipes spewed from it to join the road and become a sidewalk ornament that stretched out of sight into the distance. As our coach ambled past this sprawling facility I stared through the window and with shock, realised that it was not derelict, but a functioning factory! I saw people congregating outside its gates, waiting for a bus, and then noticed the people moving around inside its perimeter. It was just a factory in Romania, not a shattered, war damaged facility. This was - Normality!
When you read about slave labourers assembling state of the art V2 rockets for Hitler, something jars with the logic: You get the feeling of a short circuit in the brain - surely that cannot be! Surely rockets are put together in humidity controlled, spotless, air-filtered NASA sheds, not by starving forced labourers? Yet that is what happened in Germany.
Looking out at this, my first snapshot of the Romanian industrial infrastructure, I sensed the handiwork of that same perversity at work, and felt that same incredulity: 'this cannot be for real!' But it was.
Throughout our whole ten-day trip, I don't recall ever seeing a single thing that had a lick of decent paint on it. Everything was an unremitting shade of tatty grey. Everything was to some degree, like that ramshackle factory complex we passed at Oradea.

But as we began to meet the people it was impossible not to pick up on their warmth and willingness to help. They would drop everything and go out of their way to give us directions if we were lost, as we were, many times. The system had not ground them to powder. It had humbled them and brought them low. It had silently enraged them and made them a country of sneaks one upon the other. But it had not defeated them. They had defeated IT.

There were thirteen of us altogether, most of us riding in our big blue and white 1960's vintage charabanc - no doubt the conveyance of British Legion excursions to Rhyl in former times. 'Christian Life Centre' was emblazoned along its sides on giant stickers.
The trip to Romania had been organised by our Pastor, Dave Woodfield, the coach was donated by one of the congregation and the two vans by a local hire company. Dave had visited Eastern Europe, including Romania, many times before. Now, in the wake of the revolution, he had galvanised our church to respond to the frightful needs that had appeared as the veil of xenophobic secrecy collapsed to reveal the true impoverishment.

We sailed along like a caravan of gypsies, sleeping, eating and living out of our vehicles for much of the two-week journey. Our venerable charabanc looked like a mobile haberdashery shop: Every one of its luggage bays plus the inside rear (where the seats had been removed), was squashed tight with our cargo of goodies: All kinds of stuff - footwear and clothing, walking frames and invalid aids, wheelchairs, surgical equipments and supplies, even mobile lavatories! - a myriad of items donated by individuals and organisations in and around Birmingham. On our way we often came across other vans, lorries and cars from Britain and elsewhere, all similarly loaded. The Romanian tragedy had invigorated the conscience of the west, and we were one droplet in the torrent of supplies all flowing the same direction.
As we drove through villages, streams of children would run into the road and wave excitedly at us as if we were part of some victorious army column, whilst those older would stand back, some waving, some just looking on with amazement. The word had gone out: 'help is on the way!'

The uninviting visual hostility of the place which had screamed at me so aggressively when we first crossed the frontier, ebbed to a background murmur and soon, I felt completely secure in Romania. I found I could ask help from anyone, in my pigeon English-cum-Romanian, and be assured of a welter of attentions. The people treated us with great respect and their assistance was unconditionally and abundantly granted without any regard for their own inconvenience.

We plied our way through villages and cities, up and over the Carpathian mountain range, visiting churches and hospitals and disgorging our supplies to them. At every stop, armies of helping hands appeared from nowhere to help with the unloading.
Our northern-most point was the city of Suceava. We dropped off our supplies and then, with the majority of our cargo gone, we set off southward, driving through the night toward the Black Sea and Constanta, 300 miles away. We crossed the Danube just after dawn and reached the Black Sea coast by midday. By one o'clock we had found a piece of beach at Mamaia, a resort just north of Constanta. After the customary argy-bargy with the officials in charge we drove our vehicles onto the sand, corralled them into a semi-circle and pitched our tents alongside to spend a few days as tourists on the Black Sea.

Miti
It was the next day, Saturday 14th July, that something happened that was to influence my life greatly. Like all momentous events, it sneaked up from behind, or to be more accurate, from one side:
I was sat on a camping stool beside our coach, reading and smoking (Yes, smoking. I still have a weakness for cigarettes). The rest were swimming in the Black Sea but I had had enough of the water for one day. I was all alone when up came this short, rather poorly dressed man:
'Excuse me' he said, 'may I speak with you?'
'Er.. Yes, what about?'
'Oh no, not about anything… I just want to speak..'
Each sentence was nervously thought about, composed and measured. He continued as I stared at him:
'I saw the union jack on your bus… and… I wondered… You are English, yes?'
'Yes.'
'Ah good…. You see, I know English from the radio but I have never to speak it…'
He sat down and I asked him his name:
’Zaharia Chirica’ he said.
’What?’
He repeated it slowly 'Za-Ha-Ri-ah Keer-ee-kah,' adding:
'That is my real name but I am called “Miti” - it is a sort of nick-name.'
'Can I call you that please?' I asked.
He told me how he had learned English from listening to the BBC radio but wanted a chance to practise what he had learned. He just wanted to speak to an Englishman!
We must have spoken for about an hour when the rest of our party arrived in varying stages of wetness from their dip in the sea. Miti immediately got up to leave in deference to them and I quickly arranged to meet him later at the beach bar a short distance away.

'Who was that?' one of the girls in our party asked as she watched Miti walking away.
'Just a guy who wanted to have a chat.' I replied.
'Is he a Christian?'
'I don't think so.'
'Oh' she said darkly and turned away.
She wasn't interested. In fact nobody in our party took any interest in Miti, not then or later. I don't remember anyone else speaking to him even. I didn't understand it then. Much later I understood it perfectly: Miti had been sent to me, or rather, I had been sent to Romania to meet him!

We got to speak a lot those two days at Mamaia. As he struggled to invoke the correct words to communicate with me in English, I began to get the inkling that he was a deep well of understanding. We sat at the 'beach bar' (a complete misnomer, a ramshackle lean-to where beer - or as Miti described it 'slops' - was served by a disinterested, shabby bartender) and through the obstacle of culture and experience we found ourselves walking upon familiar tracks. We discovered we had much in common.

Miti came by Sunday morning and said he might be able to help us obtain gas for our camping stove. I drove with him to his sisters' flat in the nearby town of Navodari.
A dingy stairwell led us to a surprisingly well-appointed, comfortable small apartment. Miti introduced Helen, his sister, and her husband Rudi. They immediately disappeared in a noisy kerfuffle of chatter.
'Sit down please' Miti said to me, 'make yourself comfortable.' I sat down.
Helen re-appeared briefly, smiled and then disappeared in a gaggle of activity, taking Miti with her. Miti returned forthwith and said:
'Oh Dave please, you must not sit there!'
I got up apologetically, embarrassed that I had offended in some way, but Miti motioned to me to another seat:
'My sister says you must sit here.'
I was directed to sit in the best seat in the house from people who didn't know me at all!

Soon, drinks and hastily prepared food arrived, proffered by Helen on a tray sporting neat napkins and fine cutlery. I just knew it was the best they had.
While I ate Rudi worked with Miti on our camping gas canister out on the small balcony, trying to transfer gas from his tank into ours. I finished eating and looked on. Without the correct union they were using their bare hands to try and form a seal around the valve, cupping them in a clenched prayer for a few seconds until the blast of pressurised gas froze their skin. I watched them as they took it in turns, one supporting the upturned full gas tank above the empty one, while the other made the connection for as long as he could. Eventually, they gave up with an avalanche of apologies. Rudi looked especially defeated:
'I am very sorry Dave, it is not possible.'
I assured them not to worry, we would find the gas we needed somewhere along the road.
With Rudi and Helen and their three beautiful young girls waving good-bye, I set off with Miti back to our makeshift sandy habitat.
By midday, the Christian Life Centre entourage had decamped and after a short service on the beach, I said good-bye to Miti and we headed off for the capital, Bucharest, and the adventure of the long journey back to England.

Not long after arriving back home I received the first of many letters from Miti. His words were a mine of revealing information, always etched onto the flimsy, grey material that passed for Romanian writing paper. Miti had a flair for language that was explosive. He would write to me the most amazing exposés of the communist epoch along with remarkable insights into present day Romania. Although his grammar was often topsy-turvy, his use of words was magical. So much so, I decided to show a portion of one of his letters to a newspaper publisher in Birmingham.
I had known Mark Higgett from the days of 'Action' project (which his newspaper, the 'Metro News' had sponsored). Mark immediately picked up on Miti's unique style and said he would like to publish something; Could I get a photograph?
Hasty letters were transmitted to Romania to tell Miti of this new situation, and frankly, to give him an 'out' if he wasn't comfortable with it. The era of the Secret Police was only a hiccup behind, and I wasn't sure if his scathing words about the Romanian experience, along with his photograph, in a foreign newspaper was wise. (I remembered well how he had told at Mamaia that if ever he was to bump into a foreigner in Ceacescu's time, he had to report it immediately to the police, along with everything that was said!)
But Miti was not to be deflected by the fear that had once infected his country and supplied two photographs - one of himself, and another of him with his mom. The article was published in a massive spread across two inside pages of the Metro News on 11 October 1991:
'The bleeding heart of a broken land' it said in massive type, and beneath it as a sub-heading: 'Letters from newly liberated Romania.' To lend a bit of local perspective, Mark included a small bit about me, and how I came to meet 'Mytty' (as he spelled his name). My photograph was captioned 'Dave Morgan: Chance meeting.' How true that was.

Romanian Rainbow:  Miti and I watching a rainbow framing the Petro-Chemical plant at Navodari, summer 1992. 
The locals have nick-named the chimneys: 'Ceaucescu's Candles!'

Loud thoughts

If you ever have the audacity to say the words 'God has spoken to me,' you will notice people mentally reaching for the straight jacket… It's not an un-natural response, and it's a fair question to be asked: 'Oh yeah - HOW?!'
And the more time goes on, the more answers I have: He has spoken to me in what Dorothy Scrivenner wonderfully describes as 'Loud Thoughts'; Sometimes He has spoken by imparting what I can only describe as an 'Inner Knowing' - what the private detective might call a 'hunch' - or the scientist might label 'a flash of inspiration.' God has spoken to me through dreams and through the megaphone of circumstances that I could not ignore. My dad dying was one such experience. But I've never known Him use the megaphone when a penny whistle would do. In my limited experience, He speaks in ways that are simply powerful enough to get my attention.

Something happened to me after I called upon Jesus in 1988 and I realise it is not so much that God was suddenly transmitting, but more that I was receiving. Something in me got tuned in to His frequency! The bible speaks of the spirit of man coming alive - being awakened, and that's exactly what it is. When it happened to me I began to hear God's words for me in a magical way. I don't mean 'magical' in the context of trickery - I mean it in the context of coming into contact with a superior intelligence! For as the scientists who are busily searching for other civilisations in outer space readily admit: 'the methodology of a superior intelligence (or civilisation) will always appear to us as magic.'
And it is magical because if it really is the Lord of heaven speaking, then the message can't be wrong! It might not accord with reality, the situation or the circumstances, but it can't be wrong!
Later on, when God spoke to me about Mandy, it was indeed a message totally at odds with my reality. So much so, that I found it hard to take on board. Many times I thought I was going off my rocker!
But today I am married to Mandy, and I want to say that out of everything, this is the most extraordinary, wonderful thing that God has caused to happen for me. Mandy and I both know it is a miracle of God. It is something I thank Him for daily.
Of course I know it is a preposterous thing to say: 'God has spoken to me'. And many cannot receive it.
'Oh yeah, the God of all creation, who made heaven and earth (according to you), has taken time out to speak to you! Come on, pull the other one.'
So I will not attempt to explain it further except by way of cataloguing a couple of things that have happened along the way:

'Don't worry about the money'
Those are the exact words I heard. They hit me like a sledge-hammer and changed my outlook instantly. One second I was a blubbering doubting Thomas and the next I was a confident Saint Peter walking on the water. I felt as if I had just had a wad of money shoved in my pocket! I suppose it is 'the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' as Paul wrote in Hebrews 11.

It was February 1995 and I had put my name down to begin a professional Pilots Licence course. It was a marathon with several hurdles to jump: First there was six weeks of classroom tuition followed by exams. Then another course, more exams, and finally, extensive flying instruction followed by tests. The entire thing would cost the best part of £10,000 and take about eight months, and the odd thing was, I knew the Lord had prompted me to get on and do this.
Nevertheless I was full of doubts and excuses and I was bellyaching about it, arguing with the Lord as I was driving one day in my car: 'This is crazy, I can't do it. I'll never manage to get through all those exams and tests!' Suddenly I thought of the clincher, the final stark truth that must decide the issue:
'Anyway, I can't do it. There's no point me starting the course because I don't have enough money to complete it!'
I actually said it out loud and it was true! - I might have even added the words 'So there!'
But the reply came like a firecracker through the letterbox on Guy Fawkes' night:
'Don't worry about the money!'
It shut me up instantly. A strange peace came over me; the money problem evaporated completely out of my mind. It was so unambiguous and commanding. The fact was I had enough money to pay for the first part of the course (the six weeks of tuition), so that's what I did. I began the course and discovered I actually enjoyed it.
Well what happened, I hear you ask?

Nothing at all for two months - Not until April 14 - Good Friday - the very last day of the course.
The postman had left a note in my letterbox the day before saying there was recorded delivery mail for me to pick up at the post office. It was an envelope from my publisher in Germany. I collected it and sped off to Coventry Airport without opening it, knowing it would be a few hundred quid of royalties from the hit 'Hiroshima' some five years previous. Anyway, I was late.
The weather man had predicted a gin clear day, I remember we had discussed it in the classroom the previous day, met forecasting being one of the subjects we studied. As I drove the twenty miles to Coventry Airport, a few wisps of low cloud thickened rapidly and turned the expected cloudless sunny day into a 'sea fret' - a continuous thin blanket of mist. Looking at the sky I was amazed but right then the Lord seemed to say to me 'I am in control.'

As it was the last day we were tying up loose ends, collecting sample question papers and other paraphernalia before leaving early. Around lunch time I reached in my bag and remembered the mail from the post office. I ripped it open and stared at the documents inside. I couldn't believe my eyes. There was enough money to pay for the whole course plus a bit! It was totally unexpected. I praised God in my heart as I remembered that crazy promise: 'don't worry about the money.'
The cloud persisted most of that day, as if poking fun at the men at Her majesty's Met Office, but I was riding above it with the Lord on high.

But that's not the end of it: At the end of April I spent two days in Leeds doing the exams and I have to admit that so many times, looking down at those papers, I felt 'helped' - that's the only way I can describe it - Now I don't want the CAA to disqualify me after the event for cheating, but the fact is the Spirit of God assisted me both with a clear mind and also with some prompting when the fog set in. The results came in mid May. I had sailed through everything. Out of the fifteen students in our class, I was the only one to take all nine subjects and pass them all! Others got through fewer subjects but none had passed everything at one go. Yes I had powerful help. Please do not send a copy of this book the CAA.