It
happened at training camp over two years ago. Two years since I went on the World Race. Wow.
Anyway,
since training camp, God continues to deepen my communion with him. I’m not waxing theological here, but I’m just
saying that I’m recognize more and more what a gift it is to pray in
tongues. Let me repeat, it’s a gift; I didn’t earn it nor do I deserve
it.
Before
training camp, the year or so before I went on the Race, I was growing more
open to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Honestly though, I wouldn’t have put tongues in my spiritual gifts
registry. Sure, I’d take that barcode
zapping tool and scan healing, faith and maybe even prophesy (as if it were the
Kitchen Aid stand mixer), but tongues? Meh. Pass.
Yet that
night, August 6, 2008, all I did was ask God to fill me and He hasn’t
stopped. And I’m grateful that God has
such good taste in gifts for His children.
All this
just to say that I find praying in tongues helpful, especially when I don’t
know how to pray. With tongues, when I
feel the need to pray, I can without having to think about it. Sometimes I’ll only pray in tongues and
sometimes after praying in tongues I’ll know what to pray in English.
A couple
weeks ago, when I heard that Trevor was really sick, I felt burdened to pray –
not just for him but just in general. It
was close to noon when I knelt on my bed and just went at it in prayer. In tongues. Aloud.
And in
the interest of full disclosure – and many of you already have seen this –
sometimes when I pray, particularly in the Spirit, I shake. A couple years ago, it would just be my hands
that would shake; now it’s blown up into a whole body experience. Literally, I am not only moved to pray but move
a lot when I do.
I worried that the shaking and such would be mistaken as symptoms of a
neurological disorder. “What does this
mean?” I wondered to myself and asked older brothers and sisters. Then my queries shifted into, “Why I gotta
manifest Your presence like this?” – you know, more rhetorical.
like, “Okay, God, I’ll go with it, whatever it looks like,” that’s when it got more
intense. Now I just go with the flow. I don’t get all of it – the shaking
and rocking back and forth so much that it looks like I’m gonna fall backwards
and what exactly it is I’m saying – not completely, at least, but I’m okay with that. I trust Him more with that now than I used to.
going to TheCall, a prayer gathering that Lou Engle led in DC, which was
after my training camp. I saw people who would sit with their arms raised and waving
wildly back and forth. I remember thinking, as I watched these people flail about as they prayed, “I hope that doesn’t happen to me.”
anyway, that was the first part of my “quiet” time…
