Is Speaking in Tongues Real?
Encounters with the weirdest phenomenon in the church
When my mate Stephen began to speak Italian, it really caught me by surprise. That’s because without ever learning it, he just opened up his mouth one day and started to speak it.
Fluently.
Not as one learning a language for the first time but as one to whom the language was already known. The thing is, Stephen was just an Aussie kid like me who suffered the curse of monolingualism, the same as many Aussie kids. He spoke English. Just English.
And yet that night at a Christian youth camp back when I was in my teens, he began to speak Italian — without ever learning it. It was during a prayer meeting that had become particularly impassioned. We were just a bunch of kids who wanted to experience God, and so we gathered in a room after dark when we were supposed to be asleep, and we prayed. We prayed with all our might.
All of a sudden, Stephen began to pray out loud in a different language. At first, we didn’t know what to make of it, but when another kid in the room of European descent was able to translate it for the rest of us, it all seemed pretty real.
Oh, I can already hear the shuffling of feet as the skeptics line up to slam this story as imagined. I can hear them telling…
