It Came In The Other Language

Emilio has prayed in English for thirty-one years and on the night it happened he was not praying in English.

He had not decided to switch. That is the part he has turned over most. He was in the kitchen at about one in the morning, in the middle of a bad stretch, and he had been praying the way he always prays, and at some point he was not doing that any more.

He was speaking the way his grandmother spoke. Not to her; to God, in her language, which is also his and which he has not prayed in since he was about nineteen and which he does not use for anything now except with two cousins on the phone.

And that is when it came.

The settledness. About twenty minutes of it, and it was the only time in his adult life he has had that, and he cannot separate it from the language because they arrived together.

That was four years ago.

And what he has quietly wondered since, and never said to anybody because of how it would sound, is whether the thirty-one years were somehow at a distance. Whether he has been praying in a second language to a God who was waiting for the first one. Whether all of it, the whole adult life of it, has been slightly formal in a way he did not know until the formality broke.

He does not believe that theologically. He could argue against it in about four sentences.

He believes it at one in the morning, which is a different thing.

He is fifty-two.

You may know that kitchen.

Maybe your version is not a language. Maybe it is a posture, or a place, or a way of speaking you were raised with and stopped using. And maybe something arrived once while you were doing it that way, and you have wondered since what that says about all the rest.

The sentence Peter says when his categories break

There is a moment in Acts where a man who has spent his whole life with a working set of categories about who is near and who is far watches something happen that his categories cannot hold, and he says this.

Then Peter opened his mouth, and said, Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.Acts 10:34-35

No respecter of persons.

The phrase is about not receiving faces: not going by the outward category a person arrives in. And Peter is not saying it as a doctrine he learned in a lecture. He is saying it while standing in a house he would not previously have entered, having just watched God do something that ignored the whole map he had been using.

Now bring that to your kitchen.

You have a map with two languages on it, and one of them has been quietly designated the near one and the other the formal one, and the designation happened without your consent on the strength of twenty minutes four years ago.

The verse takes the map away. Not by ranking your languages the other way round. By saying that the sorting itself is not how He operates.

And He was not waiting for one of your languages and never has been. The written word says He is no respecter of persons in the mouth of a man watching his own categories fail, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach somebody who believes it theologically and not at one in the morning.

And the thirty-one years were not at a distance. The word makes acceptance turn on the person rather than on the category they arrive in, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than grading a vocabulary.

Why it probably came in that language

Let me offer something practical, and it is not a doctrine and I put it forward as an observation rather than a claim.

Your grandmother's language is the one you were not constructing sentences in.

Thirty-one years of English prayer is thirty-one years of a competent adult assembling something. That is not a criticism; it is what praying in a language you use for work and thought and everything else involves.

At one in the morning, in a bad stretch, you stopped assembling, and what came out was the language that does not require assembly in you, because it is older than your competence.

Which would mean the language was not the channel God required. It was the point at which you stopped constructing, and something can arrive in a person who has stopped constructing that cannot easily arrive in one who is still doing it well.

That is a fact about you rather than about God's preferences, and it is a much smaller and more usable thing than the sentence you have been carrying.

And what changed that night was in you rather than in Him. The word puts the acceptance on the man who fears Him rather than on the form the words took, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a smaller and truer account than the one you have been living with.

And nothing about you is under review for thirty-one years of praying in English. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has never said this to anybody because of how it would sound.

And I am not going to prescribe a language

One plain thing, because a message like this can produce a rule by Friday.

Nothing here is telling you to pray in your grandmother's language from now on. If you want to, do; it is yours and you are entitled to it and it may be a good and warm thing.

But if you take it up as a technique, you have simply rebuilt the map with the labels swapped, and in about a year you will be a man praying in a second language again, because a language used as a mechanism becomes exactly as constructed as the one it replaced.

And you are not required to find the right form before you can be heard. The word says likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and the Spirit is the one doing the interceding rather than waiting on a vocabulary.