Where the Halling Valley River Lies - Carl Halling (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

his head against a bus shelter. He stayed flat on his back for a while, abject and stinking of drink. He could have sworn he saw a shadowy figure running towards him as he lay there in the dark, but before long he was shakily resuming his journey home. However, weeks of controlled drinking and one massive binge, possibly combined with the ill effects of a violent blow to the head, resulted in his becoming ill and virtually incapacitated for what might have been as long as a fortnight. Time and again during this awful period he'd awake from a feverish semi-sleep, dizzy, faint and nauseous, with his face a deathly yellowy pale, but each time a single further second of consciousness seemed beyond him, it was as if God breathed life back into him and the terror of dying subsided. All he could do was lie around, waiting, praying for a return to normality...and when this came, he determined never to drink again as long as he lived. But we swiftly forget our sojourns in Hell...

A few months after appearing in Jim Cartwright’s bitter-sweet two-hander “Two”, David performed in one final play at the Rose and Crown theatre, the character-driven comedy “Lovelives”. Written entirely by the cast, it consisted of a series of sketches centring on the disastrous antics of a group of singletons who'd come together at a lonely hearts club in the suburbs. Perhaps then it chimed perfectly with the spirit of British post-war comedy and its characteristic celebration of banality and even failure.
Later in '95, he played two small roles in a production at the Tristan Bates theatre near Leicester Square of the famous Greek tragedy "Iphigeneia in Taurois", written by Euripides somewhere between 414 and 412 BC, these being Pylades, constant companion of the main character Orestes, and the Messenger, whom he played as a maniacal fool with the kind of "refined" English accent once supposedly affected by policemen and non-commissioned officers. Directed by a close friend of his, the houses were sparse at first, picking up towards the end of the run.
A few months later in January '96, he joined a Christian theatre company based at the Elim Pentecostal church in West Croydon, Surrey called Street Level, going on to serve variously as MC, script writer, actor, singer and musician with two other members, married company leader Serena, and 19 year old Rebecca from nearby Sanderstead. Together, they toured a series of shows around schools in various - usually tough - multicultural areas of South East London, and on the whole, were greeted by the kids with an almost uniform affection, and there was an incredible chemistry between Serena, Rebecca and himself...and then things started to go wrong.
Towards the end of the summer, Serena asked David to write a large scale project for the group, suggesting a contemporary version of John Bunyan’s classic Christian allegory "The Pilgrim’s Progress":
“I’ll put your name in lights,” she promised him.
This he set about doing, and after some weeks of labouring over what turned out to be an unwieldy and often violent epic punctuated by scenes of dark humour that occasionally verged on the Rabelaisian, he started to have second thoughts about carrying on with Street Level.
The play, "Paul Grim's Progress", had left him in poor shape spiritually, and he didn't fancy too many more of the long and costly train journeys that were necessary to get him to Croydon and back, and so began to withdraw.
By the time of his final exit from Street Level, he'd long defected from Cornerstone to the Thames Vineyard Christian Fellowship, part of the Association of Vineyard Churches founded by John Wimber in the 1970s. This was as a result of being told by a phone friend that the Vineyard movement contained members whose spiritual gifts were in the realm of the truly exceptional. His curiosity aroused, he went along one Sunday evening and had a powerful experience which made me want to stay; and so he did.
As with Cornerstone he joined a Home Fellowship group where he completed part of the Alpha course, which had been pioneered by Nicky Gumbel of West London's famous Holy Trinity Brompton.
He visited HTB at some point in the mid '90s, when it was at the height of the revival movement known as the Toronto Blessing. This was so called because it had been ignited in January 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church by St. Louis Vineyard pastor Randy Clark. Clark had himself received it from South African evangelist Rodney Howard Brown during a service at Rhema Bible Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then pastored by Kenneth Hagin Jr., father of the Word-Faith movement, one of the major strains of Charismatic Christianity, with a controversial emphasis on "Positive Confession".
The Anointing spread to the UK in the summer of 1994 where it was eventually dubbed The Toronto Blessing by The Daily Telegraph. Its main centres included HTB, Terry Virgo's New Frontiers family of churches and Gerald Coates' Pioneer People.
Pioneer's centre at the time was a cinema in the Surrey suburb of Esher, which David visited a couple of times, when it was so packed he was forced to stand all throughout the service, a situation which was duplicated when he dropped in at the London HQ of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God one afternoon around about the same time.
Like many Charismatic churches, UCKG upholds the Fivefold ministry, and so believes that the five gifts referred to in Ephesians 4:11, namely Apostle, Prophet, Evangelist, Pastor and Teacher, are still in operation.
David’s last hurrah as an actor came in the spring of '98, when he started rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare’s infamous Scottish Play, to be staged at Fulham’s Lost Theatre in the summer...and despite the fact that his three cameos - as Lennox, the Doctor, and an Old Man - were praised by cast and audience members alike, it remains his final acting performance. Quite simply, the passion to perform in front of a live audience that raged within him like a forest fire for more than two decades had long been extinguished by then, or rather turned to dread.
A few months later and the troubled, turbulent 20th Century gave way to the 21st to the sound of fireworks frantically exploding all throughout David’s neighbourhood in West Molesey. Phoning his father that night to wish him a happy new year he discovered that his mother was desperately ill with flu:
“Some start to the millennium,” he grimly told his dad.
It went on to occur to him that she’d become susceptible to the flu virus partly as a result of stress caused by his recent departure from yet another course; this time an MA in French and Theory of Literature from University College, London, which was one of the most prestigious of its kind in the world. In time though, her incredible Scots-Irish constitution saw her through to a complete recovery.
He'd found the course magnetically compelling on an intellectual level, despite an awareness that writing extensively about Literary Theory might come increasingly to disturb him, and perhaps even challenge his faith, given its emphasis on what is known as Deconstruction, a term coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. He withdrew on the advice of several spiritual advisers, but it was a decision that would haunt him for the next ten years of his life.
Subsequent to making it, he started playing guitar for Liberty Christian Centre, a satellite church of London’s Kensington Temple, a large Elim Pentecostal church pastored by Colin Dye based in Notting Hill, West London Then, shortly after agreeing to be Liberty's lone musician, he quit his position as a telephone canvasser for an e-commerce company based in Surbiton, Surrey, thus bringing a fairly lengthy period spent as an office worker to an end.
A real change in his professional fortunes came around Christmastime when he was made lead singer for Django, a Jazz band formed by Bruce LaGuard, an old friend of his father's, and which was complemented at various times by his dad, a double bass player, a brace of drummers, and David. They went on to cut several very fine demos arranged by Bruce, but these didn't result in the interest they deserved, given the talent involved.
In early '01, Liberty’s Pastor Phil decided to dissolve the church, so David made yet another return to Cornerstone, while in the summer of that year, in the wake of the 2002 Shelton Arts Festival, Django disbanded, which was a real shame because they'd finally found the audience they’d been searching for all along at the festival, evidenced by the passion with which their first performance there was greeted.
The day after their final show, David started working from home making appointments for a travelling salesman, and was briefly very successful at it, until things started tailing off in the autumn and he was let go. By this time he'd effectively left Cornerstone for good, although he was to make many subsequent sporadic returns.
This sudden exit came in consequence of a desire born of intensive internet research to seek out churches existing beyond the Pentecostal/Charismatic fold, these being Cessationist, which is to say they don't accept that the more spectacular Gifts of the Holy Spirit such as Tongues and Prophecy are still in operation. Up until then, any church that didn't encourage the speaking in other tongues David had refused to accept as being truly Christian.
Before ‘03, which was his year of relentless internet research, he'd known next to nothing about the finer points of his faith, although he was fairly well versed in the subject of prophecy thanks to having been introduced to this early in my Christian life by Denver and Rose, through various magazines and books such as “Prophecy Today” and the works of Barry R Smith.
He had no clue as to the meaning of Calvinism or Arminianism, Predestination or Foreknowledge, Cessationism or Continuationism and so on…but he didn't believe that made an iota of difference to the condition of his soul, as people – as he saw it - are saved by faith alone, with true saving faith producing the fruits of repentance.
In a general sense the year 2000 turned out to be something of a turning point for David, not just spiritually, but in terms of his entire personality, which became more inward looking, even by the standards of the previous seven years.
Significantly perhaps, the previous year had been the first since he was about 17 that he faced the world with his hair its natural medium brown after having dyed it for nearly three decades. What prompted this was not a sudden loathing for the vanity of the bottle blond, but the fact that the peroxide-based streaking kits he favoured were causing him to have breathing difficulties.
At first, he missed being blond, but in time he came to prefer his natural colour after years of youthful blond androgyny. The fact is that throughout his twenties and for much of his thirties, he had remained in a state of extended adolescence, blond being after all the natural colour of eternal youth.
In his time, David had elicited a lot of admiration for attempting to take the romantic bohemian rebel existence to its logical conclusion when all around him were conforming at a furious rate, but the price for having done so was high, cruelly high in terms of social and financial humiliation, leading David to become a veritable Jeremiah, in terms of his opposition to a lifestyle he blamed for ruing his life.
Yet, young people in