A Prophetic Song for Bald Men

Our church participated in an annual get-together called Celebration with all the other People of Destiny churches in the northeast region of the U.S. It was held on the campus of Indiana University in Pennsylvania during their Memorial Day break. Although we had very limited money and Laura thought it would be tough for her with a young baby, we decided to go. It was not one of Laura’s favorite memories.

We also decided to go with our best friends at the time which turned out to be a story in itself. They were another one of the nine couples from the Care Group who had had a baby within that eighteen-month period. They also had a daughter but some months before us. We all drove together in the same car and stayed overnight in the same hotel room on the way up. Later, we were to find out what consternation that night had brought to the husband.

When we got to Celebration, the problems for Laura started right away. Babies often don’t cooperate with their parent’s schedules. At the conference, there were three meetings a day and they pretty much fell during the times when Alexis needed to sleep. Each meeting started with singing, so Laura would try to come to that and then she would go back to the dorm room when the message started to put Alexis down to sleep. 

She was also very possessive of Alexis. She wouldn’t accept my offer to stay with Alexis so that she could go to some messages. Of course, I couldn’t nurse Alexis either. So Laura spent a lot of the conference on the floor, in the hallway, outside our dorm room. There were other mothers doing the same but Laura didn’t think it was a very good use of our limited money for her to sit in a hallway.

I loved the conference. You had to get to the auditorium pretty early to get a good seat. With a new baby we were usually late, although our friends without babies would try to save us seats. The people of PDI were pretty serious about the musical worship and walking into that auditorium was like a little piece of what I imagine heaven is like. The passion that charged the room was intense.

During the conference, I also started dancing again. I hadn’t danced in church in a while, ever since I had stopped attending the New Rainbow in London. One day we had a men’s break-out session. There were three of us from our Care Group sitting together towards the back in an empty row. During the musical worship one of the other guys started dancing, then I joined in and then the other guy. It was fun to get back into it again.

Another thing that occurred at Celebration was the Charismatic gift of prophecy. Someone believes God tells them something that they are supposed to tell everyone else in the meeting. It was a regular practice in PDI. 

There was a microphone on the floor of the auditorium for that purpose, staffed by a pastor who would screen the prospective prophecy to make sure the person wasn’t going to say something whack. If it was appropriate, they would speak into the microphone during a pause in the singing, telling everyone what they believed God wanted to say. There is also another way that prophecies can be presented I had seen before but was done in a very unique way at Celebrations. It is called prophetic song.

CJ Mahaney was the man who led PDI and there was another guy named Bob Kauflin who usually led the music. After the singing time, while Bob was still up on stage, CJ would believe that God wanted to say something about a particular subject or to a particular group of people in the audience through prophecy. But CJ didn’t get the prophecy, just the subject or group for whom he believed it was intended. What he would then say was that he believed God was going to give the message to Bob through a prophetic song.

Bob is very talented. He used to be in a music group. He is pretty good at putting together a simple song musically on the fly. But putting together the lyrics off the cuff like that is pretty difficult. After CJ would give him the challenge each night, Bob would begin to play some generic piano music for a minute, until he believed he had the song. He would then begin to play and sing on subject and rhyme it all!

One night, CJ believed God was going to give Bob a prophecy for bald people! Sure enough, Bob came out with a very poignant word. It was something about not letting their baldness define them, about making sure their identity was in God instead. It was a very memorable event which became a fun topic of conversation. Little did we know how personal it would become to our very own Care Group.

A few days after we got home, the guy we had driven to Celebration with came by CBN to talk to me. He had a hat on that he took off right away. I could tell there was something different about him but couldn’t put my finger on it. Then he told me. He had a lot less hair because he had been wearing a hairpiece all the years we had known him.

Some people pride themselves on being able to tell if someone is wearing a hairpiece. I’m not one of them. But I suspect that people can only tell when it’s a bad hair piece. NOBODY (except his wife) knew that our close friend was wearing. 

He was an actor and had been given the hair piece as compensation for a modeling job he had done for a wig store. It was very expensive and therefore, very good. At first he wore it for acting work, then on a regular basis, then all the time and it had become a part of his identity. So the prophetic song at Celebration about bald men that we all thought was very amusing was very directed and very precise for our friend and he had made the very difficult decision to be known for who he really was. 

Apparently hair pieces hurt a lot if you keep them on while you’re lying down. So what had given him so much consternation in the hotel room on the way to Celebration is that, to keep his secret, he had had to wear the hair piece all night. He hadn’t gotten much sleep.

Celebration