I hate people watching me unwrap gifts.

One of the great things about being in a new town is the ability to go visit some new churches. It's a realy exciting opportunity to see how others do that thing we call we worship. So visiting some of the local churches has been good.

This weekends expedition left me a little... I'm not sure what it left me, but I left unsettled and pondering. Essentially the whole service was fine, until the last segment when the pastor encouraged everyone to pray and start speaking in tongues. The whole room broke out in to a steady rumble. I couldn't pick out the sounds of any individual. Just many things that sounded like words but weren't drifted over me.

And I just stood there. Hand on face in a half contemplative half stunned expression. As you might be able to tell, I come from a fairly conservative background where the gift of speaking in tongues is not really something I've seen all that much.

Now that was all quite interesting, but then the appeal rang out, that if anyone who had never spoken in tongues and wanted to, this was the time. Just ask God for the gift. Pray for it now and join the rest of us.

And there I stood, hand still glued to face, feeling somewhat immobilised. I couldn't decide whether I disagreed or was being challenged. Or both.

Now my understanding of spirtual gifts has always been that these are special things. Not everyone can collect the whole set and that they are distributed out so that the individual can use them for the benefit of others and themselves in an appropriate way. It was all very confusing. But above all I try not to put limits on what God can do, even if I might be the world's most skeptical man.

Fortunately I was put on to 1 Corinthians 14.
^"18 I thank God that I speak in tongues more than all of you.  But in the church I would rather speak five intelligible words to instruct others than ten thousand words in a tongue.
²⁰ Brothers and sisters, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.  In the Law it is written:

“With other tongues
    and through the lips of foreigners
I will speak to this people,
    but even then they will not listen to me,
says the Lord.”^[e]

²² Tongues, then, are a sign, not for believers but for unbelievers; prophecy, however, is not for unbelievers but for believers.  So if the whole church comes together and everyone speaks in tongues, and inquirers or unbelievers come in, will they not say that you are out of your mind? ²⁴ But if an unbeliever or an inquirer comes in while everyone is prophesying, they are convicted of sin and are brought under judgment by all, ²⁵ as the secrets of their hearts are laid bare. So they will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, “God is really among you!”"

I guess this blog post really reflects an immaturity in my understanding of the role of speaking in tongues, but you know what they say:

"adamayd amday admays airthy gaboop."