When the editors at Chosen Books asked me recently to write an update for the fortieth anniversary edition of They Speak with Other Tongues, my first reaction was, Has it really been forty years? I went to our bookshelf, pulled out our copy and looked at the publication date. Sure enough, They Speak with Other Tongues first appeared in 1964.
This much time created a problem of its own as I thought about the request. How to summarize four decades in a few pages? Perhaps the best way was to look at the questions people ask Tib and me most frequently about our lives since the events in this book.
By far the most common question is about Tib herself. People want to know if she, too, ever received the baptism in the Spirit. The answer is yes . . . eventually.
As I relate in chapter 11, Tib gave me a tremendous gift that afternoon in Atlantic City. She stepped away from the room where friends were praying for me, taking with her our reporter’s objectivity, allowing me to focus on the present scene without concern for my role as journalist, freeing me to enter into the subjective experience. The explosive event of the baptism followed.
There were important consequences for me and for Tib. The original manuscript of the book, nearly complete at the time of my own baptism, was under our joint byline, which we had used many times before and have done frequently since. But after I “blew our cover,” as Tib put it, in Room 405, the baptism, for me, was no longer an “out-there” subject for study but an intensely personal encounter. Tib and I decided to reshape the manuscript to include our own experiences. Since a search story works best from a single viewpoint, I alone would sign the book when it was finished, though Tib continued to play as active a role as ever in the writing.
And here is where we may have mistaken our plan for God’s. As we began to work on the new approach Tib felt strongly that with one of us (me) now totally euphoric, the other one (she herself) had to keep a cool editorial eye on the project. Many times as our research continued, people asked Tib if they could pray for her to receive the baptism. She always said no. Later. After the book was finished.
When at last the book came out, Tib felt the timing was right and began actively seeking the baptism. Nothing happened. Months, then years passed, with Tib feeling not only wistful but guilty. She had said no to God, insisting on her own schedule, and now He seemed to be saying no to her.
But, of course, this is not the way God deals with our mistakes—if mistake it was. Before she could receive this gift from Him, He had another gift for her—the healing of an ancient block. Just as raising hands over head to praise God had been a point of resistance for me, there was a certain phrase used by many Christians that Tib had always resisted. In her recent autobiography, All the Way to Heaven, she describes her distrust of religious passwords in general.
One formula in particular irked me till I was willing to lose a story altogether rather than reply when someone accosted me with:
Have you been saved?
This black-and-white division of the human race into “ins” and “outs” contradicted everything I was learning about God. . . .
“How can they talk as if ‘saved’ were a switch—on or off !” I’d splutter to John.
But it was at this very point of rejection, as it often is, that God was waiting to meet Tib. Toward the end of her book she writes about an afternoon at the Guideposts office some years after They Speak with Other Tongues was published. Jean Stone, whom we had gotten to know in doing our research, had come to New York with a story suggestion for Tib.
We talked it over, then Jean looked at her watch. “I have a train to catch.”
“I’ll walk you to the elevator,” I said.
We stood in the corridor, making conversation.
“Have you been saved, Tib?” she asked. The same politely interested tone in which she’d just asked how the children were.
And for the very first time in my life, I heard the question.
Jean Stone is a mannerly, soft-spoken person. As she quietly posed the question, I didn’t hear a formula. Didn’t hear judgment or an agenda being pushed.
I heard saved as a dictionary definition gave it when I looked it up later that day: to guard intact. As Jean said the phrase that had once made me too angry to listen, it was an inclusive, not a divisive one. . . . I heard the word saved, and it sounded like loved.
“Yes!” I said as the elevator arrived. “Yes, I have!”
Jean left. I walked back to my desk. My feet walked, that is, but my soul was dancing, turning cartwheels in heaven. Cherished, valued, guarded, whatever came, now and forever.
For along with the joy of acclaiming her salvation came a spontaneous outpouring of a heavenly tongue. There in the corridor, without asking for the baptism, without the prayers of a group or someone laying hands on her head, Tib was given a glorious infilling of the Spirit and a fluent and beautiful prayer language that she has used with joy ever since.
So when we are asked if Tib has received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, the answer is a resounding yes—in God’s special time and place for her, different from mine as every baptism is different. We have been together through all the adventures of these last forty years.
They have been quiet adventures. Neither of us is strong on large conventions, although gatherings of the Full Gospel Business Men will always hold a unique place in our affections since it was at one of these that I received my own baptism.
But if we don’t seek out large meetings, we are asked how, then, do we find expression for this new dimension in our lives?
From the first we have gravitated toward smaller, more personal groupings of Spirit-filled people. We find them wherever we go, in this country and overseas, clusters of committed people meeting without fanfare to seek guidance and empowerment as they go about the work of the Church. Often they take on the gritty, unsung chores that attract few recruits. Teaching in the inner city, building a school in Nicaragua, nursing an AIDS patient—what all of them bring to their labors is the joy that is the signature of the Spirit.
For ten years following the publication of They Speak with Other Tongues, a prayer group met weekly in our living room. It was charismatic in makeup and practice, yet each person continued in his or her own denomination. We were Presbyterians, Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, stressing service flowing back into our churches rather than fostering any separatist sentiment.
Our emphasis was always intercessory. We met to sing and praise and study the Bible, but mostly to intercede for needs we knew of. It was a fluid group because we live in a suburb with a constant turnover of population. New faces meant that we faced a wider-than-usual sampling of the problems of our time as encountered in any typical town. Our families, friends and neighbors confronted marriage breakups, alcoholism and drug addiction, the death of children, illness, sexual problems, job loss, mental breakdown. One by one, as these opportunities for intercession occurred, we brought to them the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Some situations were resolved happily, some not, but always we knew we were responding with the most supportive tool there is: Spirit-filled prayer.
Although the people in our prayer group are now scattered to the far corners of the country and the world, we are still in touch with one another. And through them we can answer another question Tib and I are often asked: What long-range difference does the experience make? Out of those weekly gatherings came a series of life changes.
One man, a rising star at The Reader’s Digest, quit his job to study at a seminary; today he leads a Congregational church in New Hampshire.
A woman returned to the practice of law, which she had given up when her children were born. She began devoting herself to defending indigent clients.
Another member of the group went back to school to become a therapist working with alcoholics.
Still another, a woman whose seven children (her own and a deceased sister’s) were still at home, earned a Ph.D. and did pioneering biological research at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. When the children were grown she took a teaching post at a medical college in an impoverished Caribbean nation.
For all these people the calling remains intercessory. They have simply added hands and legs to their prayers.
Did new direction for Tib and me also come out of that renewal prayer group? It did indeed. Early one morning five years after the publication of They Speak with Other Tongues, I awoke to what appeared to be a vision. It was a black-and-white “photograph” in front of my eyes, in sharp focus, perfectly clear. It showed six men and women—Len LeSourd, Catherine Marshall, Dick Schneider, Van Varner, Tib and me—seated at a table on which lay a stack of books. Beneath the black-and-white picture, which seemed to be an advertisement of some sort, were the words We search the world to bring you true stories of God at work today.
From this beginning, with support and direction from our intercessory group, came Chosen Books Publishing Company, from which has emerged such titles as Corrie ten Boom’s story The Hiding Place and Chuck Colson’s Born Again. All the people in the “photo” did eventually join Tib and me in the company, and the amazing impact of hundreds of Chosen titles has been as unexpected to me as that initial vision.
There are other questions. Are we still Episcopalians? Yes, we are. Perhaps we attend a charismatic Episcopal church? No, we remain in our local parish, St. Mark’s, Mount Kisco, New York.
Though our work keeps us away from home sixty percent of the time—or perhaps because we are so often among strangers—this church that we have attended since 1959 means more and more to Tib and me as years pass. St. Mark’s is a liturgical church, which means that the Eucharist is the center of our worship life. Both Tib and I find that this combination of the Eucharist twice a week (Sundays and a 6:45 A.M. celebration every Wednesday), plus a regular diet of Bible reading, plus small group meetings infused by the Spirit, provides a needed balance in our lives.
Do we still speak in tongues? Definitely. Praying in the Spirit is a large part of our experience, both of intercession and of praise.
When we are interceding, tongues are God’s perfect provision for those times when we simply don’t know how to pray, whether for the imponderable problems facing the world at large or for those wrenching personal situations. I remember our dilemma when Tib’s mother, Joy—“Grandjoy” to our children—was, at 84, in her last illness. Her mind was clear as ever but her body was failing. She was not able to feed herself, could hardly sit up, had to struggle just to breathe.
It seemed to us that Grandjoy was eager to go, but neither of us could contemplate praying that she die. So we turned to the God-given resource of prayer in the Spirit, bypassing our minds, trusting Him to utter the perfect prayer for us.
Our son Donn, his wife, Lorraine, and not-quite-two-year-old Lindsay had flown up from Florida so that Grandjoy could meet her great-granddaughter. When the nurse indicated that Grandjoy was tired, Donn, Lorraine and I left the room. Tib, Lindsay on her lap, lingered behind, praying silently, she told me later, in the Spirit. Lindsay began to wriggle, and Tib, thinking the toddler had sat quietly as long as she could, stood up to leave. Instead of heading to the door, however, the little girl walked straight to where her great-grandmother sat in her wheelchair.
Grandjoy was a stranger to Lindsay. The nursing home setting, Grandjoy’s stooped form and beautifully wrinkled face could have been frightening. But Lindsay reached a small hand up to Grandjoy’s cheek and began to stroke it, again and yet again. As moments passed and the two remained in wordless contact, it seemed to Tib that God was showing her Grandjoy as she appeared to Him. Not an old, ailing woman, but a wide-eyed little girl at the beginning, not the end, of life.
A few days later Grandjoy slipped peacefully away. For Tib and me, that interchange with Lindsay was the perfect answer to the Spirit’s perfect prayer.
And when an occasion calls forth praise and thanksgiving beyond our ability to express, tongues are again the natural place to turn. Such a time came for me in the summer of 2003, when 41 of us gathered at a rustic camp in the Adirondacks for a family reunion. One evening everyone converged on a single cabin to celebrate my eightieth birthday. Round numbers sneak up on you by surprise: I looked around and realized that I am now the oldest member both of my family and of Tib’s. And looking, I saw . . . my wife of 55 years, our three children and our three children-in-law, our eight grandchildren ranging in age from ten to 25.
I thought of the years here on earth granted me since that light-struck vision of Jesus in my hospital room. Remembered the joys, the lives that had touched mine, the work I had been allowed to do. Remembered the sorrows and the losses, too.
And all of it was very good. Gratitude swelled in me till I could scarcely contain it. Tongues were the only way I could express it.
Because Tib and I have always considered this a private form of worship, I uttered the tumbling syllables silently. Later, though, I found a quiet corner of the woods and let my thanksgiving out—praising Him for who He is and thanking Him, among many gifts, for a prayer language with which to praise Him.