Messages spoken at various Camps Farthest Out by Charly Morgan.
Charly Morgan is a dental hygienist from Princeton, Kentucky, and one of the longtime leaders of the Kentucky camp of the Camps Farthest Out. She came to her first CFO camp in October 1980, only months after her sixteen-year-old son, Bill, was killed. What began as a friend’s invitation to a camp she had never heard of became a lifelong ministry. She eventually chaired the Kentucky camp, served on the Advisory Council Ring, helped lead the program committees for the 1995 annual meeting and the 2000 CFO International, and spoke at camps in Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Charly was born Charly Lester and grew up on farms in western Kentucky, the middle child of nine. She was named for her grandfather Charlie. There was no electricity in the family home until she was a freshman in high school. They were Southern Baptists, and she was baptized in a pond. Her father did not say much about his faith. “He just lived it.” When Charly was about four, she told the story of Abraham and Isaac at church and suddenly broke down crying. “And I was Isaac. And Abraham was my daddy.”
She married her high school sweetheart straight out of school. They spent two years in Detroit and two more while he was in the Army, including a time in Germany, before returning to Kentucky and starting a trucking business. They had two daughters, Liz and Vonna, and a son, Bill.
In 1962 they moved to Princeton, where Charly joined First Baptist Church. The pastor’s wife, Jenny Jones, put a little Phillips New Testament in her hands. “And I became so hungry.” In the late 1960s, small groups began meeting at the church, where they learned conversational prayer from Rosalind Rinker. In February 1977 Charly and her sister knelt beside her bed and asked the Lord to fill them with the Holy Spirit.
Then came the loss that changed everything. On January 1, 1980, Bill, sixteen years old, was killed when his truck left the road on the way home from a New Year’s Eve date. At the hospital Charly looked at him and stroked his face. What she saw was not a broken body but a whole boy, without blemish.
Years later Mary Virginia Parrish helped her understand that experience. “God let you see Bill without blemish. And that is how he sees us.” Charly had one prayer that year: “Please, dear God, don’t let this be wasted. I can bear it if I know it isn’t wasted.” She finished dental hygiene school that spring, and her classmates let her talk about Bill as much as she needed to.
In October, a friend of her sister invited her to the Kentucky camp at Kentucky Lake and sent her on a scholarship. Charly had lived within forty miles of the camp all her life and had never heard of CFO. As she left home, someone handed her Jeremiah 29:11 on a torn piece of notebook paper. It became her life verse. CFO gave her a place where grief could become ministry. Back in Princeton, she sponsored a group for bereaved parents and taught new Christians at her church. “God wastes nothing. God wastes nothing.”
She was soon asked to serve on the Kentucky camp council ring. Her marriage ended after twenty-six years, and she went through a deep depression. Mary Virginia Parrish sent her home with a simple assignment: “You go home and you pray a prayer group into being.” She did. By 1983 or 1984, about ten people were meeting every week in Charly’s home, and the group was still meeting a decade later. She led the first prayer meeting at her church ever led by a woman. When she chaired a nominating committee, they prayed together every week for two years before they asked anyone to serve.
It was a long way from the woman Charly knew herself to be. “I was an extremely, extremely controlling person.” Her children called her “the top sergeant.” Around 1989, she and a group of women began praying Charles de Foucauld’s prayer of abandonment. Gradually she learned what surrender meant. “It’s safe to abandon to God.”
She became chairman of the Kentucky camp in 1986. That same month her father died. She carried one of his sayings with her: “I won’t let this make me bitter. I’ve got too many things to be thankful for.” Her involvement with CFO continued to grow. She attended her first Advisory Council Ring meeting in St. Paul in 1991 and spoke at an entire camp for the first time in Wisconsin in 1993 with Bill Godfrey. In 1995 she chaired the program committee for the annual meeting at Blackstone, Virginia, and spoke at Northern Michigan with Stan Carter and at Kentucky Lake. In 2000 she served on the program committee for the eighth CFO International at Sandy Cove, Maryland.
One of the most unexpected chapters came in 1994. Dick Morgan, a retired Princeton funeral director, asked Charly to marry him. He was the man who had cared for Bill after his death fourteen years earlier. She did not receive a simple yes or no when she prayed about it. Instead, she sensed that this was a gift she was free to receive. She married Dick. “It’s in character that Dick reminds me of my Dad.”
When she spoke at Northern Michigan, she told Stan Carter, “Stan, I, like you, came to CFO when I had lost a child, had buried a 16-year-old son.” The shared grief that had first brought them to CFO had become part of the ministry they carried to others.
Dick died in 2015, but Charly’s ministry continued to grow out of the same lesson she had learned after Bill’s death: God wastes nothing. She often prayed, “Grant that my life not be a waste.” She passed on a word from her Aunt Edna about the mountains of life: “It’s okay to climb mountains and some, it’s even good to climb. But when you get to the top, the mountain’s still there. And if you cast him into the sea, it’s gone.”
She also saw CFO as more than a pleasant week away. It was training. “I want to suggest to you that in these days here that you think of yourselves as an athlete in training to be an athlete of the spirit.” She warned, “Well, let’s don’t play CFO.” And she believed that prayer changes the way a person sees everything: “The more we pray, the more we think like God thinks.”
*Note:
Many speakers lived before the days of the internet and many had very limited biographical information available. The information in these biographies came mostly from transcripts of their messages, and relies heavily on their own spoken words. Please contact us if you have any corrections.