I attack my prejudices every day.

Every day I bring myself to account as Baha’u’llah commands. He says, “Bring thyself to account each day ere thou art summoned to a reckoning.” Ever since becoming a Baha’i I have brought myself to account.

During Black History month I doubled my efforts to overcome these character defects of prejudice. I do this through prayer and reflection and education, education of all that my black brothers and sisters have contributed to the formation of our great country.

If it were not for my black friends I would never have found the Baha’i faith.

I want to share a story with you. After graduating from Bowdoin in 1980 with a BFA, I lived in Brunswick for a year, doing my art with a fellow art graduate. During that year I applied to an MFA program in printmaking and painting at USC. I got there in 1981, but left after I became disillusioned with life and wanted more.

Soon I met two men living out of their car on a beach in Los Angeles. One was waiting for the return of Christ, which he thought would happen very soon. I started traveling with him. Our journeys brought us to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we lived and I worked in a pizza restaurant.

Before we left L.A., however, my car had been towed and was in the city impound lot, waiting to be reclaimed or crushed.

So, I decided to fly back there from Tulsa and drive back in my car. Prior to my leaving Tulsa, I had a dream. A dream that I would meet a man while driving back from LA.

On my drive back from Los Angeles to Tulsa, I had one passenger with me. We drove for a while, stopping in Flagstaff, Arizona. When we departed Flagstaff in the dead of night, we chanced upon a person, someone who was not hitchhiking.

Something took hold of me and made me pull over and stop the car and invite them along. He took me up on the offer and the first words he spoke were the words from the dream I had before I left Tulsa — I knew he was the one about whom I’d dreamt.

He also had a dream, one that told him he didn’t have to hitchhike, because a person would pick him up and bring him back to Christ. He, too, had been waiting for the return of Christ.

A short, very dark skinner man, he was a Muslim who had found Islam while in prison. He said Islam was the next revelation from God, after Christianity, and that I should read the Quran.

Because of this, we went to the Tulsa library. We were in the religious/spiritual section and something took hold of me like I was a robot, making me bend down and take a book off the lower shelf. I handed the book to my new friend without reading the title. Functionally illiterate, he didn’t try to read the title, but put this hand over the cover and told me it was what we are looking for — it was a book about the return of Christ.

The book, “ God Passes By,” was about the first 100 years of the Baha’i faith.

So you see, without my African-American brother I would never have found the Baha’i faith, and without his white American brother he would never have either. God brought us together like two wings of a bird.

Tim Wilson lives in Harpswell.