I was weeding the vegetable garden behind my home in Holland one summer day in 2003 when the telephone rang. The garden is where I go when facing a problem too big for me, and I didn’t welcome an interruption. The phone kept ringing, though, and at last I went in, dropping my wooden outdoor shoes at the door, and picked up the receiver.
It was my friend John Sherrill, calling from New York to hear how my trip had gone. John and his wife, Elizabeth, are two of the people who pray for me as I travel in the Muslim world today. I had gotten back from Palestine the previous night.
“It was the toughest trip yet,” I told John. “Everyone’s set on revenge; no one wants to hear the other side.”
Old, personal friends, I went on—Christians, Jews and Muslims alike—are threatening to blow each other up, and the rest of the world, too.
John’s voice had the hint of a smile in it. “It’s not the first time, Andrew, that you’ve stood in the middle of clashing worldviews.”
Indeed it was not. My mind went back to the days when John and “Tib” traveled with me behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains at another time when enemies threatened the world with annihilation. Then, as now, we needed a language that knew no borders, no racial or cultural limits—the language of a Love that surpasses understanding.
Whenever John and Tib and I found ourselves in a “hopeless” situation behind these Curtains, where fear and mistrust made ordinary communication impossible, we would quietly, secretly pray “in the Spirit” and watch locked doors open, barriers vanish, forbidden friendships form. It is my most constant form of prayer today, behind the curtains of religious division and hatred across the Middle East—God’s own words of peace and hope spoken into the babble of angry voices.
As John and I continued to reminisce, I knew that in all history there has never been a more important role for this prayer language than to intercede for today’s polarized world. Because bringing a new dimension into any needful situation is what speaking in tongues is all about. It is the language of Love, using God’s own vocabulary—the perfect idiom for bringing to any problem the healing power of the Holy Spirit.
Brother Andrew
author of the international best-seller God’s Smuggler
July 2003