BY JEANNE JORDAN

HEN I BECAME AN Adventist back in 1941, I became at the same time a vegetarian-cold turkey, so to speak. It was not actually by choice, however. This radical change in my diet happened when, as a newly baptized church member, I left home-not by choice in that case, either. My father had "suggested" I live elsewhere until I got those "foolish Advent notions" out of my head-which left me virtually homeless. I was also jobless, having been fired from my bank job for refusing to work Sabbath mornings.

To my rescue came a local church couple. They offered me a job as a live-in housekeeper and nanny to two preteen boys. That took care of the joblessness as well as the homelessness-and my former diet: this couple was vegetarian. Nothing that had ever moved on its own was served at their table. I went abruptly from the full range of carnivorous choices to peanut patties and gourmet gluten. After a three-month period of "drying out" on the farm, I went directly to my first of five years and three summers at Emmanuel Missionary College (EMC), working my way to a degree and to total abstinence from meat. Thus, nourished on the institutional cuisine of the formidable doyenne of diet, Miss Hornbacher, I too became a confirmed vegetarian (with no regrets).

The imprint of those years stays with me. When the strong Tenth Mountain Division man of World War II became my husband seven years after walking out on me because of my religious beliefs, he also converted to my meatless diet, and together we reared two vegetarian children.

Although public opinion toward vegetarianism has changed from the ridicule of my early veggie days to widespread acceptance and increasing recognition by the health-care community, and although vegetarianism is urged by Ellen White, I have no burden to make converts to this choice. What you will read here are a few among many experiences that reflect the way this lifestyle can lead to some interesting contacts and even work as a witness to God's plan for humankind.

Veggie Tales Begin
I was teaching in a public high school when this poignant experience took place. The counselor in that school was taking graduate courses at nearby Andrews University (the EMC of old, where 20 years earlier my carnal appetite, thanks to our Miss Hornbacher, had been tamed). One day when Howard, the counselor, dropped by Apple Valley Market near campus to pick up something for lunch, he found in this supermarket every possible food commodity (and some impossible ones) except the one he was looking for: meat. He knew me to be an Adventist, as did the whole school; my oddities-my vegetarian diet, my absence at Friday night sports-were even featured in the school paper.

Howard came to me wanting to know why no meat. Quickly I searched my mind for the right answer. I couldn't then say that it was better for people's health. Not at that time-not before all the studies, mad cow disease, and long-lived Adventists. The answer I came up with? "Because, Howard, in the afterlife there will be no killing, no slaughterhouses, no taking of life of any animals." It was something, I suggested, we should probably get used to now. His reaction took a turn I was not expecting. "You believe in an afterlife? Tell me about that."

What a green light for me! Now I could turn to the weightier matters of the law. In the hour that followed, he had learned about the state of the dead, the Second Coming, and the heaven to come, and had promised to accept a book I would bring him on Monday. He never got that book; for him Monday never came. On my return to school that morning I learned that he had fallen asleep at the wheel, run into a tree, and been killed. The impact of that loss still haunts me. Had I given him the right answer? Had I, in however small a way, prepared him for eternity?

The kids at that same high school often confronted my veggie option with challenges. How could I possibly go without meat; wouldn't I get anemic? They knew that the recommended food for good red blood was good red meat. To end the challenge, I took my whole French Club, a group of 25 or so, for a vegetarian meal at Andrews University. The food services director outdid himself to make sure the young people would understand how pleasing vegetarian food could be. In one of the private dining rooms he set up elegant tables with a dazzling spread of meat-free food. My own family got together a little program with a "command performance" by my two teens: a French skit, poems, and songs. While we ate, a teen string quartet played soft music. Before we ate, we had grace, maybe for the first time in the lives of some. Those rambunctious kids, dressed in high style, behaved as if they were dining at the Tour d'Argent in Paris. They loved the food; they loved the evening.

No, none of them became Adventists as a result, or even vegetarians, but when my husband and I left to go back to Africa a year or so later, we took with us a gift from those public school teenagers-$500, our entire French Club treasury-to use in the mission field.

Not all our experiences ended up so fortuitously, of course. Some years ago when we were living near Los Angeles, we heard of a high school friend of my husband's who was principal of a school not far away. When we made contact with him, he invited us to a backyard picnic at his home. Though we usually alert people ahead of time to our diet preferences, this time we didn't. On our arrival, with the barbecue heating up, our host announced it was time to get the ribs on. My husband hadn't seen him for years, and he knew nothing of our religious persuasion, but something stopped him midway to the refrigerator.

"You don't eat pork, do you?"

We confessed that no, we didn't, but that that was all right because we could see salads and other things on the picnic table; there would be many other options for us. But he insisted he would give us something we could eat. Before we could further protest, he was back in the kitchen getting the makings for grilled burgers.

There are times, dear reader, when even a confirmed vegetarian has to eat what is set before him, as the apostle Paul advises in 1 Corinthians 10:27. After all, Scripture tells us the kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink (Rom. 14:17). The night of those barbecued burgers was probably when we realized we couldn't change our appetites back to meat for anything. We got through the meal by smothering the burger in beans and potato salad and washing it all down with copious quantities of lemonade. At least we weren't offered beer, though that was the drink du jour.

We invited those friends to our place later, served them a vegetarian meal, enjoyed a great time explaining our choice and why, and maintained the friendship for many years.

A Change of Vegetarian Venue
When we first moved into our apartment in Brussels for a year of study in Belgium, our landlord kindly offered to show me around the neighborhood so that I could get acquainted with the shops and follow the traditional European way of marketing. As he took me along the cobblestones he pointed out the greengrocer, the baker, and the fruit seller. Then "Voilà," he said, "le boucher."

"I won't be going to the butcher," I told him, just to keep the conversation going. "We're vegetarians." He fell silent, apparently not knowing how to respond to such an aberrant choice.

The story goes on.

In our apartment our tiny bathroom had a gas meter that needed to be turned on to heat the shower water on the spot. One weekend when our son was home from school in France, his father shut all the hall doors around the bathroom to keep out the noise of his shower while Tom slept.

The plot now thickens: The gas heater was not vented to the outside. Still in bed myself, I was awakened by Tom's shaking me and telling me something was wrong with Dad. He had passed out and fallen over in the hall, blocking the door so that Tom couldn't get through to him. I ran to the door, and we pushed mightily against him until we opened the door a crack and called his name. He aroused a little and gasped for air. We opened an outside door to admit winter air and somehow got him out of the hall-with only one fall and a pair of broken glasses-and onto Tom's cot in the living room. He was limp, ashen-faced, but alive.

I ran downstairs to the landlord and asked him to call an ambulance because my husband had fainted. Oh no, an ambulance would take too long; he would call his doctor friend nearby, who wouldn't be in his office because it was Saturday. When the doctor arrived only a few minutes later, our excited landlord burst out with "He fainted; I don't know why; il est végétarien!"

After examining my husband and giving him an EKG right on the spot, inspecting the bathroom and heater, and explaining the simple lack of oxygen, the doctor sat down for a visit.

"You say you are vegetarian? We are too, my family of five, all vegetarians."

My husband, who was as surprised as I was to find vegetarians in Brussels, but ever ready with a word in due season, sat up shakily and asked him if he had heard of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. But of course! He played in a string ensemble in which the Adventist pastor's son was the violinist. In fact, he had helped with the Adventist stop-smoking program right in the city. We had a lovely time discussing our SDA health emphasis with the one doctor out of the many in that city of more than a million whom the Lord had sent to help us that day. Some people would call it coincidence; we called it providence.

From Belgium to Africa
As missionaries we didn't travel in elite circles by any means, but once in a while we were brought into the company of high-ranking officials. Our choir at Gitwe Adventist Secondary School had gained a reputation throughout Rwanda that, in the end, put us on the national radio station daily with recorded patriotic songs. In the capital city of Kigali, the French government had just built the beautiful new French Cultural Center. As part of the opening festivities our choir was invited to sing several numbers-folk, Bach, and spirituals. The music went over so well that the French ambassador to Rwanda later had a dinner party for the choir director, his wife, my husband (as the directeur of the school), and me, along with the American ambassador to Rwanda and his wife.

In the opulent setting of the embassy residence we were entertained with a meal for diplomats! At the long table, with its beautiful floral centerpiece and the official china of the République Française, we were served by seven-foot-tall waiters in dazzling white uniforms, who hovered over us attentively to refill goblets and whisk away, course by course, our empty plates. Each course had it own wine, and as an unsolicited accommodation to our teetotaling tastes, the "wine" of choice for us was something we don't drink any more than we do wine: Coca Cola.

What can I say? It was a grand enough concession to us that these refined people had not offered us alcohol and were graciously paying no attention to the ugly Coke bottles nesting among the foiltipped bottles in the silver wine buckets. We quaffed our Cokes.

The evening went swimmingly. The conversation was brilliant, the attention to each of us undivided, the French cuisine memorable. It was memorable especially for Madame Ambassadress, it turned out. At the end of the meal when we withdrew into the splendor of the drawing room for what probably would have been brandy and cigars, but what was a cup of tea instead, she sank onto a sofa next to me and whispered confidentially, "How was it? The food, I mean. Was it all right?" When I assured her that the food was magnifique, she relaxed and let out a sigh of relief. "It was the first vegetarian meal I have ever served. I was so nervous." She was nervous?

Before we headed home in our unstately VW Combi, my husband invited the ambassador to speak at our school assembly. I followed up later with a written invitation to them both for dinner at our house afterward, an invitation composed in the most elegant and proper French I could muster, with all the protocol demanded in a formal invitation. In a few weeks they arrived at our house in a long black official limo, with the Tricolore flying and a liveried chauffeur at the wheel. We were invited into the back seat to ride the few meters up the road to the chapel, where the lecture was held. Naturally our choir sang for the occasion, choosing several French folk songs. Then afterward in our humble home we served them-what else? A vegetarian meal. It was the culinary challenge of my life, as you may have guessed, the details of which I sacrifice to lack of space.

We sat at the table in true French fashion for two hours of engaging conversation. At the end Madame once again voiced a confidential question: "What was the meat?" I introduced her to the mysteries of soy and gluten, and accepted, with a sigh of relief of my own, her gracious pronouncement of "Absolument délicieux."

My point in relating these stories is to emphasize that we have never found any reason to hide our lifestyle under a bushel. Other such incidents have happened to us through the years. You just never know where a vegetarian meal can take you! We have found in our long vegetarian lives, like Daniel of old, that taking a position on diet often leads to unusual opportunities to speak of and for the Lord. In all circumstances, therefore, our motto is: "Whether you eat or drink . . . do all to the glory of God" (1 Cor. 10:31, NKJV).

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Jeanne Jordan is a retired teacher and author writing from New Mexico.