The Hope of Pentecost

"When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability." Acts 2:1-4

When friends used to ask me why I chose to pursue a college degree in engineering, sometimes I would answer only partly in jest, “it was one of the few college degrees I could get without having to take courses in a foreign language.” My small-town Nebraska high school offered Spanish courses, but I managed to avoid those by taking woodworking or Algebra 2 instead. Avoiding courses in foreign languages was one of the themes of my early academic life, along with taking all the courses in math and science that my small high school offered (and even a Trigonometry course I had to take via correspondence).

As my life experience has piled up (and up) over the years, however, I’ve come to a much deeper appreciation of those with the skills to master more than the language that they were born into.  When we go about our occasional travels to Chicago, or to other places in the country more diverse than Valpo, I find the occasional snippets of overheard conversations among the passers-by in a variety of unrecognizable (to me) languages to be an uplifting and hopeful experience. It strikes me as a marvelous and wonderful thing that so many choose to spend their time visiting America, or maybe they’re here for work, or even better yet to build their lives here.

So, while I haven’t experienced any heavenly tongues of fire to somehow rearrange my brain when it comes to understanding or speaking a foreign language, I suspect that the Holy Spirit has been instrumental in helping me towards a much deeper appreciation of the incredible richness that people from all over the world contribute to our lives each and every day.

And maybe that’s what the whole point of the biblical reference was in the first place.

In faith and hope,

Jerry Kahrs

“In the crowded kitchen I learned to know the foreign peoples among whom I had always lived. I sat down in the middle of the kitchen and listened to the talk going on around me – Czech, Bohemian, Norwegian, Swedish, a little German. It was like being in a foreign country, where the climate and the landscape were the only things that were familiar.” From My Antonia by Willa Cather