The Accent You Flatten

You heard yourself do it in March and you have not been able to stop hearing it since.

You were three sentences into something in a meeting about a completely ordinary matter, and you heard your own voice, from slightly outside, the way you sometimes do, and you thought: that is not how I say that word.

It is not a big change. Nobody in that room could tell you what it is. The vowels come in a bit. The rhythm goes flatter. A couple of words that in your mother's kitchen have four beats in them come out with three.

You did not decide to do it. That is the part you cannot get past.

There was no moment where you sat down and thought, right, in that room I shall speak differently. It happened somewhere in the first year, the way water finds a channel, and by now it is automatic and it starts before the first word.

And here is what has been sitting on you since March.

Your mother's voice is in that word. The four beats are hers. And you have been quietly filing it down for eleven years in a building where you are supposed to be more at home than anywhere else on this earth.

The first thing the Spirit did was accents

There is a detail on the day of Pentecost that is so obvious nobody looks at it. Everybody talks about the fire and the wind and the three thousand.

Look at what the crowd actually says.

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

In our own tongue, wherein we were born.

Not a common language. Not a single clean tongue that everybody could manage. God could have done it that way, and it would have been simpler, and every account of that morning would have been shorter.

He did it the other way. Fifteen nations are listed by name in that chapter, and every single one of them heard the works of God in the speech they learned as children.

That is the first thing the Holy Spirit did when He came, and He did it on purpose, and it is a statement about what the room is going to be like from now on.

So take this now, eleven years in. You are meant to be heard in the voice you were born with. The written word puts that at the very front of the church's first morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranged it that way, and there is no version of that building in which your mother's four beats are a thing to be filed down.

Nobody in that room asked you to do it

Now let me say the part that is going to be uncomfortable and freeing at the same time.

I do not think anybody made you do this.

There may have been something, once, years ago, somewhere. Very likely there was, and it may not even have been in that building; it may have been a teacher, or a first job, or a boy at fourteen. Something happened and a small machine got installed and it has been running ever since.

But nobody in that congregation is running it now. It runs itself, and it is running on eleven-year-old power, and the people in that room have never once heard the voice they would be given if it stopped.

And I will say the other half plainly, because this is a thing people get wrong: adjusting how you speak in different rooms is normal and everybody does it and it is not a sin. You are not being asked to become a person who talks the same way at a funeral and a football match. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

The question is not whether you adjust. It is whether you can stop, and you cannot, and that is the difference between a skill and a governor.

You are welcome in the tongue you were born in. His word puts fifteen nations hearing in their own speech on the first morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did that, and He has never once required a person to file anything down at a church door.

The plain hall and what was in it

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule that not one seat in it could be rented.

That neighborhood was not one people. Read who was living in those streets in that decade and you find half a dozen languages within a few blocks, and the accounts of that hall are full of people who did not sound like each other.

That is not incidental to the story. A room with no price at the door tends to fill with people who do not sound alike, and a room with a price at the door tends to fill with people who do, and after a generation everybody in the second kind of room believes that is simply how church sounds.

Bresee's room sounded like the street it was on.

The written word has the Spirit handing out mother tongues on the first day, and the Holy Spirit has never changed His method since.