Enjoying my beard journey – Semper Reformanda

Forgive the selfie that’s not my Modus of Operandi. I’m enjoying my journey with this new beard. Here it’s only two ½ months old and has already been trimmed twice.

I’ve learned some new things this time around. In California, our humidity was often a single digit, so my dry skin itched too much. But the humidity in Tennessee makes a beard more comfortable. Sometimes, I don’t even know it’s there.

This journey is also different because, for the first time, I’ve been using beard conditioner, beard oil, beard butter, and an afro pick comb😆.

I purchased a sample six-pack from Live Bearded, and my wife enjoyed smelling a new scent over 6 days. She liked the 1880 and Legend scents the most. She’s been looking at different beard styles and she wants it “full and long.” Lord willing, the beard’s on the way.

My beard represents many things. It represents the early church history and reformation where Christian Theologians grew a beard to disguise themselves as they fled martyrdom at the hands of Roman Catholics. It represents the masculinity our Lord has given. It is also a Southern thing y’all. It represents a symbol of rebellion against feminists who despise men’s facial hair. But more importantly, as an ambassador of Christ, my beard is by the grace of God and for the glory of God, and a Christlikeness of His Son. And more about church history.  

As Tertullian said in the third century.

“This sex of ours acknowledges to itself deceptive trickeries of form peculiarly its own–such as to cut the beard too sharply, to pluck it out here and there, to shave around the mouth.”

– Tertullian (vol. 4, p. 22)

As Clement of Alexandria wrote in the third century (disclaimer, I don’t have a hairy chest).

“How womanly it is for one who is a man to comb himself and shave himself with a razor, for the sake of fine effect, and to arrange his hair at the mirror, shave his cheeks, pluck hairs out of them, and smooth them!… For God wished women to be smooth and to rejoice in their locks alone growing spontaneously, as a horse in his mane. But He adorned man like the lions, with a beard, and endowed him as an attribute of manhood, with a hairy chest–a sign of strength and rule.”

– Clement of Alexandria (vol. 2, p. 275)

“This, then, is the mark of the man, the beard. By this, he is seen to be a man. It is older than Eve. It is the token of the superior nature….It is therefore unholy to desecrate the symbol of manhood, hairiness.”

– Clement of Alexandria (vol. 2, p. 276)

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that ran down upon the beard, even Aaron's beard: that went down to the skirts of his garments; As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended upon the mountains of Zion: for there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life for evermore.” - Psalm 133

#Beardsman #Beardsmen #Manhood #Masculinity #BiblicalManhood