Using feelings/leadings to understand the tongues stuck out at us.

I recently did a weekend of training for my South Africa trip.

It was a weekend of fellowship, discovery, and healing. Lots of girls crying. I didn't make them cry...I swear. And it was good for them. At the end of the weekend, I had a chance to talk to guy who they cried with and made an observation.

Me: You seem to be very sensitive to the feelings of other people.
Him: Why do you say feelings?

And so started a short conversation on feelings versus leadings of the Holy Spirit. I am not good at distinguishing between either so I categorize my impulses as feelings. Why is this important? Well, this weekend was an eye-opening experience regarding the leadings of the Holy Spirit.

One of the speakers at the retreat brought up the topic of speaking in tongues. With the skeptic in me now weighing in, she continued to speak about how speaking in tongues is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit expressing itself. We then did an interesting exercise where we partnered up and tried to glean messages from the Holy Spirit for our partners. So I get together with my partner and pray together with her for guidance and then we try to meditate. We only spent about 15 minutes and I only saw a few coherent pictures in my mind. The rest were way too random and complicated to try and explain.

However, my partner saw some interesting images for me that I can share. A warrior on a journey. Swimming in water and resting for the moment. I did not share anything when she indicated those images to me...but she seemed somewhat surprised when I incorporated her images in my sharing/testimony at the end of the retreat and also shared about having kendo practice swords in my car trunk. What happened next? Well a bunch of us ended up playing with my swords at the end when everyone was hanging out before leaving the retreat site. A couple people were surprised to learn that I had actually trained in kendo and that my "costume" last Halloween was actually real. Coincidence? Maybe...but it will be interesting to see if the warrior journey pattern plays out in my life.

When the subject of speaking in tongues was brought up...my mind flashed back to a memory of watching the movie, Babel, in Korea with my cousin. I'm glad we were able to watch it with Korean subtitles or else I probably would not have gotten as much out of it. On the flipside, my cousin came out of the movie a little confused. For those that have not seen the movie, here is a plot summary from IMDB:

"4 interlocking stories all connected by a single gun all converge at the end and reveal a complex and tragic story of the lives of humanity around the world and how we truly aren't all that different. In Morocco, a troubled married couple are on vacation trying to work out their differences. Meanwhile, a Moroccan herder buys a rifle for his sons so they can keep the jackals away from his herd. A girl in Japan dealing with rejection, the death of her mother, the emotional distance of her father, her own self-consciousness, and a disability among many other issues, deals with modern life in the enormous metropolis of Tokyo, Japan. Then, on the opposite side of the world the married couple's Mexican nanny takes the couple's 2 children with her to her son's wedding in Mexico, only to come into trouble on the return trip. Combined, it provides a powerful story and an equally powerful looking glass into the lives of seemingly random people around the world and it shows just how connected we really are."

I asked him after the movie if he was able to figure out why the title of the movie was "Babel". He had no idea...so I explained to him the reference to the Tower of Babel in the Bible. At the time, I had thought of the movie as a message showing how miscommunications and misunderstandings result in misfortune. But what causes these miscommunications and misunderstandings?

What popped into my head during my flashback was that all of us have our own tongues...different frames of reference. We learn to speak different tongues when we interact with other people...taking on things like lingo, experiences in similar hobbies, and maybe personalities. At work, I have separate tongues that I use for different teams and I'm currently learning a new tongue in my new job:

Mentor: Ok...so just build that suite, do a conversion, and generate the lists. Make sure your targetting and pruning are correct."
Me: Ok. Wait...hmmm....uhhhhhhhhhhh.

And we keep creating new tongues as we go along in everything we do. I don't even really know what half my friends do at work because of the amount of specialization we have in the workforce. I'm an avid snowboarder but I have no idea what the sportscasters are talking about during the ESPN Winter X Games Snowboarding Superpipe competition. Between the distractions of friend updates on Facebook (I'm avoiding Twitter for now) and networks of friends moving all over the world, I don't remember the what, where, and why of everyone anymore. If the building of the Tower of Babel had even a fraction of the specialization that we see today, I can see why it failed.

But...everything that we do in partnership with other people should also help us understand them in part. One of the easiest ways to connect with and understand other people is to have similar experiences. We come up with our own models for how people act and react. We create personality tests to better understand each other. Are we going to have increasing specialization in personality types or is the full diversity of personality already in existence? Whatever happens, we have this balance between the increasing amount of specialization in life and the extent to which we can experience that specialization.

Maybe we will figure out better ways of profiling people. But when I think about the ability of that one guy to make girls cry at retreat (albeit in a healing way) without having had the time to get to know them, I wonder if perhaps we can keep up with the increasing demands of people by embracing the Holy Spirit.