The Biggest Question of All: Part 5

I stayed. I was not sure what I thought of the whole Holy Spirit thing, but I felt that I had come this far, and I was afraid that maybe this was what I needed to do, get prayed for, in order to know that God was real. So I sat down in front and waited for the people who were praying for us to come to me. Now one of the gifts that the Apostles received in the Bible when the Holy Spirit came to them was the gift of speaking in languages they had never learned, and that was what these people of today were also saying could happen when someone was receiving the baptism in the Holy Spirit. They referred to this phenomenon as the “gift of tongues”. So when the people began to pray for the person right next to me, they asked him to say anything that he felt he was hearing or thinking, even if the words made no sense as they put their hands on him. The man began making a few odd sounds, and right then, I felt so scared that I bolted up and skedaddled myself out of there. 

What in the world??? What was I doing?? Was I nuts??? How would I ever explain any of this to my husband, let alone to my parents the next time I saw them. I drove home with all kinds of crisscrossing thoughts in my head. I had loved the joy of the people, and the feelings that swept over me of longing when they were singing and when the teachers spoke so lovingly of Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit. But I didn’t understand this “tongue” thing or the praying at the end, and I was sure my family would think I had gone over the edge if they knew what I had just witnessed.

That night I could not sleep, and I tossed and turned in bed until I couldn’t stand it, and then I crept out of our bedroom, through the apartment, and out onto the deck at the front. We were living on the third and top floor of our building, so I looked out over fields to the lights of a building about two miles away. It was a dark night, but it was warm, and a gentle breeze comforted me. I began to think about life. 

If my parents were right, there was no purpose to life that I could see. If life was just an accidental set of unusual events where some cells began to gather in an odd bunch of “just right” muck that allowed them to be some prelife form and that suddenly made a jump into a one-celled organism that could motor on it’s own and exhibited all the proponents of a living thing, and that began a series of evolutions that eventually led us to the human beings of today with all the animals and earth and sky and trees and, and, and… then life was nothing but a bunch of nonsense. Why would my mother and father, who somehow believed this ardently, have lived all their lives??? Why would anyone put up with all the problems with work or family members or illnesses such as cancer, or, more simply, a broken down car or a leaky house? I didn’t like teaching. I didn’t like living away from my family and friends. I didn’t like providing for us so that my husband could go to graduate school when I wanted to go there. I didn’t like getting fat or starving myself to try to stay thin. For me, right at that time in my life, it seemed that the negatives outweighed the positives. And even though I loved my husband, it seemed to me, just that night, that if people really believed the scenario my parents painted, suicide would be the only solution. End the pain early. Get out! Don’t be so stupid that you would try to hold on to nothing! How had my parents lived to be in their fifties?? Who would??

I began to think about all the churches all over the world and especially about the people I had been with the day before. Many of the teachers of the sessions I had attended had advanced degrees from accredited universities like my parents did. Many were ordained clergy of one kind or another, so they had studied as my parents had. And these well-spoken people believed that God existed.  And why, if there was no God, were there churches of many kinds all over the world?? Who was filling them? Were all of those people deluded?? Were the people I had been with earlier all crazy? Yes, the tongues thing was crazy, but so was the idea that a human being started as an accident if you really wanted to get literal. I could walk and talk. I had eyes that could see and ears that could hear. I had a mind that could contemplate the meaning of life. And I started as a cell in muck?? Or could I have been carefully created by a Being who could do even more than I could? Could I be part of a plan? Could I have a meaning beyond the pain? It was a lot to think about! Either way, it seemed to me that I would have to take a leap of faith to commit myself to a belief system that was kind of shaky. And I was ultimately back to needing something to help me prove something one way or the other. UGH!

I began to talk about my confusion to the God who I didn’t know existed.

“God, I don’t know if you are out there. I don’t know if you even exist, let alone hear me tonight. But I am desperate, God. If you are there, I need to know it. If you aren’t there I see no reason to go on with this farce called life. Why should I keep living when there is nothing but trouble and some joy and then death? When I think of all the churches and the people who were at the conference, I think there must be a lot of people who do believe you exist. I am going to make a decision to believe in you, God, but please, I am asking you to someday let me know that you are real, that you DO exist. Please, God, baptize me in the Holy Spirit someday even if it means that I have to speak in “tongues”.’

I felt peace after that. I tried to see if I had any new words in another language, but nope! Nada! I went back to bed and fell asleep.