Week 41 Acts
The first chapter of Acts is a quiet one. Peaceful. Calm. It’s an introduction to the book. And it builds a nice bridge from the gospel stories. Chapter one’s calm turns out to be a calm-before-the-storm kind of calm because chapter two just explodes: suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm in the skies…Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages.
I heard a story an African guy told about how he’d travelled far from home to a place where people spoke another language. He wanted to tell those people the story of Jesus, and one day he was praying and begging the Lord to help him learn the language quickly. He was praying in his own language – obviously – and by the time he finished the prayer he realized he was praying in the language he didn’t know. The story seemed pretty wild, and I talked to the guy later in private. Apart from the fact that it was impossible to believe there was nothing loony or carnival about the guy, so that it all seemed plausible – in a impossible-barring-miracle way.
I thought about that guy today while I read Acts two with its unilingual-one-minute gathering interrupted by gale-force winds and fire the next. And then…bi-linguality.
Note: quote from Acts 2:2-4 (NLT)