The Language Your Heart Prays In

He always sits on her left, because her left ear is the one that still works properly, and because from that side he can lean in without turning his whole body and making a production of it.

The whispering starts about four words into the first sentence and does not really stop for an hour. He runs slightly behind, never level, because a sentence can turn at the end and a man who translates level gets caught out and has to reverse, and reversing is the thing that makes people look round. He does not do every word. He does the load bearing ones. He has a small flat hand that means he is telling a story, I will give you the point in a second, and she waits, and the room laughs, and six seconds later she laughs, and hers is easily the best laugh in the building.

There are words that simply do not cross. There is one the preacher is fond of that sits somewhere between homesickness and hope, and there is no bridge for it in her language, so every time it comes round he builds a little rope one on the spot and gets her over.

And nobody asked him to. That is the part people get wrong when they hear about it. Nobody in that building put him in that seat. There simply was not anybody else who could, and one year somebody found out that he could, and it turned out to be a kindness well within his reach, and kindnesses well within your reach have a way of quietly becoming Sundays. The people around him are warm. They love his mother. Two of them have learned to say hello in her language and say it every week with the same terrible vowels, and she adores them for it.

So this is not a complaint about a congregation, and I am not going to turn it into one.

But you know the whispering. And you know the thing underneath it that will not fit into a funny story about vowels. A hundred services have gone through you and out the other side, carried across in a low voice for somebody you love, and not one of them has ever been a service you sat inside. You hand the whole hour away four words at a time. And the language your heart actually prays in, the one you count in and dream in and would shout in if something happened on the stairs, has never once been the language the room was speaking.

He Never Asked Anybody to Meet Him Halfway

Here is the first thing the Holy Spirit ever did in public, and it is worth slowing down over, because most of us have read straight past it on the way to the sermon.

A hundred and twenty people in an upper room, a sound like a rushing wind, and a city outside full of visitors from everywhere. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and on down a list Luke writes out in full, fifteen entries long, when he could have put and many others and saved himself the ink. And what the crowd says is not what a wonder. It is a question, and the question is about language.

And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?Acts 2:8

Wherein we were born. Not the language of the temple. Not the trade language of the empire, which every single person in that street could get by in well enough to buy bread and pay tax. The one they were born inside. The one their mother used over them when they had a fever.

God had a hundred and twenty mouths available that morning and could have used them for one clear announcement in the language the whole street already shared. It would have worked. Instead He went to the trouble of fifteen kitchens.

You were met in your own tongue before you ever learned to carry anybody else's. That is not sentiment, it is what Acts 2:8 records, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did it: He arrived in fire and His very first move was to make sure that not one person in that street had to stand there translating. He crossed the whole distance Himself, fifteen times over, before breakfast.

That is not a charming detail about a festival. It is a statement about how God talks: He goes to the mother tongue, and He always has. He met a woman at a well in the worst heat of the afternoon, on her ground, at her hour, and opened with the cup already in her hands.

You have a first language with God, and it is not the one you use in the aisle. Scripture says the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, which means the Holy Spirit runs a channel underneath every language there is and prays in it when the words have run out. Whatever comes up out of a person at three in the morning, before anybody has decided how it ought to sound, is that channel, and it was never the polished version He was waiting for.

And this is where the ache lives, because the whispering is genuinely good work, which is exactly what makes it so hard to name. A bridge is one of the better things a person can be in a room. But a bridge does not get to stand on itself, and after enough years the part of a man that came in hungry stops putting its hand up, because there is a job to do and it starts four words into the first sentence.

Nobody Carries the One Who Is Carrying

There is a particular tiredness that belongs to interpreters, and to anybody who has ever been the only one who could do a thing. It is not the tiredness of effort. Effort is clean and it sleeps well. It is the tiredness of never once being off duty in the room you originally came to be fed in.

You are not the corridor of this house. You are a room in it, with your name on the door. The written word says you are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God, and Ephesians 2:19 carves out no exception for the person who happens to be useful in the doorway. The Holy Spirit is the one who sealed that, not the rota, and He sealed it long before anybody found out what you could do.

Nor is your mother a weight, and I will not let that thought stand, because it comes creeping in the moment a man admits he is tired. Loving somebody at close range is not the same as being burdened by them. The two feel similar at the end of a long hour, and the difference matters, because one of them can be laid at the Lord's feet and the other one cannot and should not.

You have been heard every time you prayed in the tongue of your childhood, and not one of those prayers needed carrying across to Him. Scripture puts it plainly: the Lord looketh on the heart, and 1 Samuel 16:7 was said over a shepherd boy nobody had thought to call in from the field. The Holy Spirit runs no queue at the border. He receives what comes up in the language it comes up in, unrendered, unrehearsed, straight off the floor.

You were given this ear as a gift, and a gift is never the price of the seat you sit in. Scripture calls these things gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, and Romans 12:6 puts the giving before the using every single time. The Holy Spirit hands a person a capacity because He is generous, not because He is charging admission. A gift that has quietly turned into rent has been misread, and it can be read again this morning.