A friend and I had spent the night in the bar and it was around midnight when we arrived back in the little town where I lived.  We weren’t ready to call it a day yet, so when we saw a light in a friend’s house we went and banged on the door.  They let us in and we sat around, drank coffee and visited about things that didn’t really matter.

Before we left, I blurted out “Someday I am going to be a Mennonite and wear a beard!”  I was just as shocked at that revelation as my friends were.  Where did it come from?

I had consumed a considerable amount of alcohol, yet I knew this was not some drunken whimsy.  My memory of that moment is crystal clear and I knew it was somehow connected to the thoughts that I had been mulling over in my mind for many months.

A few years earlier I had concluded that church, Christianity and the Bible were nothing but meaningless fantasies.  I had walked away, believing I would have no need of such things.  But I could not find anything else to give meaning to my life and I grew increasingly restive in the emptiness.

I had been reading history, particularly church history, and the thought began to grow upon me that if there were real Christians to be found anywhere in the world, they would be found among the Mennonites.

My mother had been raised in a Mennonite church, but she had walked away from that church when she realized that it’s most inviolable belief seemed to be that the German language must be maintained at all cost.  That should have turned me completely off of looking for anything meaningful among the Mennonites.

Yet history was telling me something different, of people who had a faith they were willing to die for.  People who were persecuted, tortured, put to death in all the cruel ways invented in medieval times, yet never fought back or displayed any enmity towards those who persecuted them.  Even my mother, though she was now a member of another church, seemed to still have a latent conviction that the Mennonite understanding of the Bible and of Christian life was the true way.

I thought that there must still be Mennonites somewhere who held to the old evangelical faith.  I didn’t know where to find them.  And I had never seen a Mennonite of any kind who wore a beard.  How did that fit in?  The only answer that has ever come to me is that if God has a purpose for my life, perhaps he also has a purpose in making the hair to grow on my face.  Why then should I be so careful to remove all trace of that hair from my face every morning?

Where did those words come from that I blurted out in a semi-intoxicated state that night?  I believe it was the Holy Spirit momentarily breaking through the fog of confusion in my mind to offer direction and hope.

It took another ten years before those words became reality.  During those ten years I got married, started a family and moved a number of times, visited a lot of churches.  My wife and I have been members of the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite for almost 34 years now.  And I do wear a beard.

We can’t boast of being wonderful or outstanding people.  But the faith is alive and well and spreading in many countries around the world, in many different languages.