My own personal Pentecost
And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit was giving them utterance. Acts 2:4
I plan to continue discussing the shift in prayer direction God gave me in April, but May 10th is a very important anniversary for me in my walk with God. Therefore, I would like to share about it with you before I pick back up on last week’s topic.
It was Saturday night on the 10th of May, 1975. I had just finished finals and was back in my hometown to prepare for my camp counseling assignment starting in June.
I was visiting a church in town that night with a friend from the college Bible study and her mother. This church had been experiencing power of the “Jesus Move”, and I had heard a tale (confirmed since then by many unrelated witnesses) about a strange phenomenon that had happened there sometime before the evening I attended.
According to what I heard, it happened something like this. At some point in one of the worship services, while the congregation was praising God in song, flames of fires were seen—not inside the building by the congregants, but outside, shooting up from the roof—by individuals in the neighborhood and folks passing by on the highway. Those inside worshipping God were oblivious to the sign from God until their service was invaded by the local fire department after several calls had come in to the station, alerting them to the church fire. I’m imagining that the leadership of that church could have paraphrased Peter in Acts 2:15-19, “This building is not on fire as you suppose, but this is what was spoken of through the prophet Joel…I will pour out My Spirit on all mankind…and I will grant wonders in the sky above and signs on the earth below, blood, and fire, and vapor of smoke” (emphasis added).
The night I visited was relatively tame in comparison, but first, let me backtrack before I describe what took place that evening.
I had gotten saved at the end of December, ’74, and was water baptized in April. I was sold out to Jesus who had visited me, saved me, and landed me in a fervent, intimate body of young believers. But I lacked something that I desired with all my heart—the baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in other tongues.
I knew about it because when my Bible study friends worshipped God and communed with Him, I sometimes observed their mouths moving quickly but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Just about all of them did it; it intrigued me, so I asked one of them about it.
“Oh! We’re just praying in the Holy Spirit!” she explained. “We’re speaking in tongues. You can read about it in Acts 2.” That’s all she said, and I went away all the more hungry, on a mission from God to learn about this mysterious baptism of the Holy Spirit and speaking in other tongues.
I read Acts 2 and everything else in the Bible I could find about the subject and kept straining in the meetings to hear what it sounded like. But these young people were “stealth” tongues-talkers; they did it regularly, but no one could hear their heavenly language! To this day, I enjoy praying that way at times when I’m in a crowd—a stealth tongues-talker in the midst of the world!
I lived on the seventh floor of my dorm and often sat on the heating register that was by the window as I looked out on the campus. More times than I can count that semester, I sat in that spot, mirror in hand, and said to the Lord, “Fill me with the Holy Ghost now!” And I would look in the mirror to see if He was moving my mouth at all. Nothing. That only resulted in this: I became even hungrier for the baptism in the Holy Spirit.
And there I was, on May 10, 1975, sitting in this vibrant church next to my friend and her mom, worshipping God, when a very strange thing happened. My tongue started “jumping around” in my mouth and I began to make quiet clicking noises. It didn’t scare me at all; it was soothing, but I thought it was odd.
I leaned over to my friend and whispered, “My tongue is clicking around in my mouth.”
She began punch-slapping me in the arm and whispered enthusiastically, “Oooo! Ooooo! Ooooo! You’ve got the Holy Ghost!”
So this is what it’s all about, I thought and kept on clicking quietly, still rather puzzled by the clicks.
After the meeting, I told my friend’s mom what I had experienced with the clicking, and she repeated her daughter, verbatim, “Oooo! Ooooo! Ooooo! You’ve got the Holy Ghost!” But she added a bit of wisdom to that and said, “Keep practicing. You can speak in tongues whenever you want now as you pray, and as you practice, it’ll sound more like a real language; you’ll grow in it.”
So my personal Pentecost launched me into a new avenue of prayer and communion with God. I practiced whenever I was alone, my language started sounding more real to me—not just clicks—and I grew in it, just like Mrs. Belt said would happen.
But then, five or six years later, as a young teacher, I went to the movies and watched a quirky comedy. It was about an empty Coke bottle falling out of a plane over Botswana, Africa, and landing on the head of a sweet bushman who lived a primitive life there with his tribe. The chaos and comedy and national crisis that unfolded were memorable enough (I love good comedies), but what gripped my gut with holy awe was this: the bushman’s language—clicks made inside his mouth by his tongue “jumping around” in there—was the very language I spoke on May 10th, 1975, when I was first baptized in the Holy Spirit!
Thirty-nine years later I’m still praying in the Holy Ghost, and I am still deeply grateful for this wonderful gift!
Dorothy
For these men are not drunk, as you suppose… Acts 2:15a