divine guidance

Saturday morning I went to a leadership enrichment course at the church, after which I was just standing around talking to some folk. Steven, one of the church staff with whom I had become firm friends over the xenophobia era, walked up asking if I had some place I needed to go to? If not, could I help him by praying for someone?

“Sure!”, I said, “why not?”

I followed him into the church area they call “behind the veil”, a corner sectioned off from the main auditorium by long curtains. As we arrive he points to a group of people sitting in that bus-seat position identifiable as being the audience in a lecture saying “you’re to pray for one of those men there”, his finger in the general direction of a specific trio. Steven turns back to find someone else.

With no more specific instruction I walk over to the men, and choose to speak to the guy furtherest from the entrance. I hear Steven’s voice and look up to see him waving the finger with more authority; he is pointing to the man closest to the entrance, a man dressed in smart wear, good Sunday clothes. “You pray for him!”.

Introducing myself, I grab a chair and move away from the group. I ask who he is and what it is he wants prayer for. As yet I have no idea why these people are in this lecture, what the lecture is about, or why anyone in this scenario would ask for prayer. He gives his name in a quiet, calm, peaceful voice, a gentle man. His eyes make contact and he says he seeks prayer because he’d like to be able to speak in tongues, but he has some doctrinal issues that he would first like to understand.

He explains that he is from a Baptist bckground, that he and his family moved from Zimbabwe nine months ago, that his wife has been able to get her ID book and start at a job, but that he had experienced numerous delays in getting his ID book. The result being that he is jobless and the burden of bread winner lies solely on his wife. I can see a tangible discomfort settle on his shoulders.

He tells of his life in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where he worked as a production manager at an abbatoir, and how his eldest, a son, had been in the Rugby 1st team and yet they couldn’t find a school here in Cape Town that would accept him based on the ‘O’ levels he had. A father’s heart brought lines of concern on a face reflecting a deep seated agony struggling to get to the surface. His son had had to give up a dream of being a rugby star and settle for studying at a commercial college.

He spoke of smaller children. Each confronted with the ramifications of the move to South Africa. This move had been in the plans for some time, not it wasn’t just a flash decision made on the spur of the moment, with the children prepared for the changes, but eager, expectant, hopeful.

He looked up and said “This is who I am, and I would like to be prayed for, but I need to understand”.

I had to smile. There are those who don’t believe there is a God, let alone that he would be interested in the individual, one amongst billions on the planet. On the other hand there I stood talking in a large hall, and seemingly randomly I’m asked to pray for someone. I randomly choose someone, after some vague instructions, yet when I walk up to the group, I am specifically directed to one man in a group of thirty. The directions are given by a man who knows the Dennis I am now, but knows little of my past.

This man wants to understand, expressing a desire to grasp the teachings of this new church, but needing to approach from a Baptist, “solid-on-the-word” perspective.

I had to smile.

I studied three years, full time, at a Baptist bible college. I was born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and I trained in the city abbatoir on leaving school (my father insisted I get a job, any job, and he found that one for me by asking the guy next to him at a pub!). On moving to South Africa, Zimbabwe chose to rescind my passport at the border post. With no passport and no means of identification it took two years of standing in queues at the Home Affairs department, every three months, to apply for a temporary work permit before I was naturalised as a South African citizen. Two years of not being able to leave the country!

I moved to South Africa over twenty years ago but only recently to Cape Town. I know the hardship of trying to fit into a new country, I know what it is to have no ID book and I know the frustrations of trying to fit into the clique that is Cape Town.

I explained that the phenomena known as “speaking in tongues” was not introduced as a new thing in Acts 2, where Peter preached and the Spirit moved amongst three thousand new believers causing them to speak in language they themselves did not understand, but that were identifiable by those Jewish worshipers who had arrived in Jerusalem from afar.

Numbers 11 [NIV]

24 So Moses went out and told the people what the LORD had said. He brought together seventy of their elders and had them stand around the Tent. 25 Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke with him, and he took of the Spirit that was on him and put the Spirit on the seventy elders. When the Spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but they did not do so again.

In the Old Testament (Numbers 11) we read that a time came when Moses had had enough of trying to motivate the people he had been told to lead. A conversation ensued between Moses and G-d, in which he, Moses, was instructed to gather seventy leaders of the people, in return for which, G-d would “take some of the Spirit that rested on Moses” and place it on each of the seventy elders, so that they would be “anointed” to bear the burden of leading the masses with wisdom.

Seventy are selected to meet outside the camp, but only sixty-eight arrive at the gathering. Moses prays, and the Spirit is seen to be landing onto the men around him. They respond by bursting out prophesying. A young lad come rushing over to tell Moses that the other two, who hadn’t arrived for the meeting, were also touched by this strange, new thing, and were prophesying in the camp. It is interesting to note that the word says “they prophesied this time only and never again.”

Acts 2: 5-12 [NIV]

Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked: “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs-we hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues!” Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, “What does this mean?”

In Acts 2, the Spirit is seen to be landing, and, to the amazement of those around, three thousand people begin to speak in perfectly voiced languages that these people could never have known. The travellers in the city can hear clearly what is being said, in languages they know to be local dialects in places far, far from Jerusalem. These languages have the usual ebb and flow of a language and are not simple, repeated chants, like the mantra of the eastern religions. It’s as if the people speaking these word know that it is a Person they are speaking to, not a mindless idiot who doesn’t mind if someone stutters the same syllable in the belief that volume and repetition will do the job.

This event was seen at the time in the light of what had happened to the seventy. It was taken to be the one-off sign of a new beginning. Little did they know that it was something that would happen repeatedly when the apostles laid hands on new believers and the Spirit was asked by the person themselves to “baptise” them – authority given to an external being to exhibit publically what was experienced privately within their heart.

For many this was an immediate bursting forth in words that were not understandable to themselves, but it was not all that exhibited in this way. There were some who knew that a new something had taken place, they felt a difference in their life, but without the instant verbal outpouring. These people were no less touched by the event, yet were somehow looked down upon as not having made it, because they had not been “heard” to speak in tongues.

The same holds today. I am often asked if I know “how to” speak in tongues, as if it was something one learns. It certainly is a badge of acceptance in pentecostal churchs – you know you’ve made it when you can babble forth along with the crowd. Yes, I do know what it is to commune with my G-d, what it is to express words of adoration so unfathomable to me but releasing to the agony within me. I have a language embedded in me that voices quietly at times, someimes just recites in my mind. No, I’m not any less a believer. Yes, you may speak, as is expected, but rather do what is genuinely led of G-d, and not what is expected of man.

I spoke of the abbatoir, and I told him of how much of his life was mirrored in mine. We spoke of the mightiness of a God who through so much randomness could choose to put two people together who would have so much in common, and place one person with just the right background in just the right place to be able to answer just the right question from just the right perspective.

We prayed.

He smiled. Reaching into his shirt pocket he pulled out a scrap of paper on which he had written:

“If it wasn’t impossible, why would we need God?”