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I had a strange but lovely experience earlier this month – taking the funeral of a friend who sat next to me in the first form at Abertillery Grammar School, a very long time ago. Threaded with music that he loved, it affirmed an identity he cherished through many years away from Wales. Derek’s origins were always a mystery. His parents seemed much older than mine or those of our classmates. They died when he was in his teens. When he was 19, the family solicitor informed him that he had no birth certificate or any legal identity. He left the office stunned. He was in turmoil, briefly homeless, with drink a significant problem. Who was he? The question never went away. A friend’s invitation to church led him to a quiet but profound discovery of Christian faith. Within a few years he was in university starting a journey which would take him eventually to a doctorate, ministry in four very different churches, and a rich variety of experience - leading 15 school assemblies a month, setting up an Alcoholics Anonymous group, caring for heroin addicts, and much more. As an industrial chaplain he served, among others, the rescue services - and, despite his deeply held pacifist principles, the military, available to top brass and office cleaners alike. But the question of the confused 19-year-remained: who was he? Long fascinated by Hebrew, he wondered about having something Jewish in his background. He and his wife spent decades researching, before discovering that his birth mother had been an evacuee from the London blitz living in a neighbouring valley. At 59, and to his immense delight, he found a brother he’d never known he had. The families welcomed one another to their homes and shared Passover and other meals. His new identity as a Christian believer had changed his life. In the little congregation, he found an acceptance and care that he felt he’d never experienced before. ‘I could only believe that it was because they believed – not in me, initially, but in the God they recognised in Jesus.’ Finding a further identity, and being accepted by his Jewish family, had taught him, he said, ‘that our God is much, much bigger and more accepting than we think and believe - an openness which already marked his life He was once asked where he would have been if his mother had not given him up for adoption: ‘I would probably have been a rabbi.’ Well, rabbi or Baptist minister, I know that this oldest of my school friends still has much to teach me, maybe especially that ‘God is much, much bigger and more accepting than we think and believe.’