Tongues

Author's Note:

If I remember it correctly, I began writing this story to boast to others that I can write Mathematical fiction. Well, God slapped my butt for my inappropriate reason and the story was shelved for a year.

Recently, I was able to grab hold of its unfinished manuscript. I read it and I was overwhelmed by its potential as a story. And God, like He'd always done, touched my heart and gifted me the inspiration to complete it.

So here it is. It talks about Math, it's in English, it's spiritual, but yeah... it's just fiction.

I pray to God that you'll get something out of this, though.

- Mike

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TONGUES

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It was Sunday morning and the new sun was breaking with pillars of radiant colors seeping through the stained glass windows of the huge metropolitan church.

The sound of the congregation rose from whispers and cries to chanting and wails, drowning the background music. With tear-soaked and engaged faces either bowed down low or raised, their hands were raised to the limits of their shoulder sockets, eyes shut close, while the pastor's raspy loud voice led them on. "The Holy Spirit is here! Right here! Right now! Here in our midst! My brothers and sisters! Let the Lord bless you with the supernatural blessing of his Holy Hands! Let the Lord touch you and change you forever!"

Twenty pews from the altar, literally at the far end of the church, way behind the warm bodies of the congregation, Eric Newberg stands alone. With tightly closed eyes and a lowly bowed head, he was deep in prayer, asking—begging—for that spiritual touch that everyone but him seemed to be aware of. He had followed every rule in the book, every suggestion of his church peers, every concept defined by known believers—eyes closed; breathing relaxed; forget one's self; focus on God; go back to the cross; know what the Lord has done for you; know how He suffered for you; it's called love; accept it; cherish it; give it back to God. But as Eric desperately begged to have even the slightest touch from heaven, there was none.

For a Pentecostal Christian like Eric, the experience of the supernatural—speaking in tongues, seeing visions, the gifts of healing and prophecy—should be second-nature. Pentecostals believes that the Holy Spirit mediates in all aspects of Christian life, and that spiritual gifts are signs of the faithful. Consequently, however, the absence is a sign that faith is simply absent.

And this was what Eric feared, sans his desperation. All members of his family were 'spiritual'. His father, the late John Newberg, was a prophet of the church who could spell out the future for any faithful he could lay his hands on. His mother, Mary, had the gift of healing. His sister Ruth was a worship leader and could lead the congregation in singing and praying in 'spiritual language'. Almost all Newbergs were Pentecostals with spiritual gifts.

Except him. And his grandfather.

"Don't you be like your grandpa," his mother once said. "He sold his faith for thirteen pieces of silver, and with the silver, he built a lab and blasphemed God with it."

Eric's grandfather, the late Professor Trevor Newberg, a scientist, tried to find the science behind the spiritual gifts, failed, and died as a backslider.

"The idea is for you to desire God," Eric's sister would tell him. "Be desperate... really, really desperate for a connection with God."

"I've tried that," he would say. "It's not working for me."