Conversions and De-conversions - Losing the fire, the spirit and innocence

So far, I am enjoying writing about my Conversions and De-conversions. I am noticing certain trends, and piecing together aspects of my young life that would lead to my continued entrenchment into religion, and my ultimate de-conversion from religion.

What, in my story so far, has led to my de-conversion?

My parents were not rooted in a strong religious tradition. They were just as spiritually adrift as I was.

I had an early, if undeveloped, exposure to evolution, paleontology, and astronomy.

I loved to read, even at an early age. I loved picture books, but I was not afraid of reading more advanced material – even if I did not understand it all.

I was already critiquing the very human nature of worship by seeing the artificial patterns in it.

I was inspired by personalities on television that were unlike anybody I knew in my real life. Television scientists seems so much more interesting than our ranting pastor, Grandpa Wagner.

But there were also things adrift in my life that would eventually lead me deeper into religious belief:

I was becoming increasingly aloof, alone, depressed, confused, and even angry.

I was raised in a stifling environment. I knew no other perspectives or points of view. Unlike my desert isolation in New Mexico, I knew alternate religious traditions were out there. I was aware of Methodists and Unitarians in Cape Girardeau. But they were not in my sphere of influence, and I had no compelling reason to investigate them. I had my Truth. My religious destiny seemed forced on me by a channel of ignorance.

Those were the ‘Seeds of Change’ in my young life. Each of these items would only intensify after my family moved to southeast Missouri, and I entered my high school years. One more item would be added in those years, and I am not sure if it caused my de-conversion from religion, or my entrenchment into religion. Probably both. I will discuss that in my next installment of this series.

I never felt more out of place, I was never more a fish out of water, than when I was living in Southeast Missouri. I still remember my first morning there, as I woke up in a tent Grandpa Wagner had pitched on somebody’s farm. I remember the smell of freshly cut alfalfa, rolled into giant circular bales, unlike the square bales I was used to seeing in New Mexico. I remember an intense humidity unlike anything I had ever experienced. I remember the peculiar Midwestern food, which was completely absent of beans, red chile, or corn tortillas. Nobody spoke Spanish, and there were no mud brick homes.

There were no long-haired Jesus Freaks who wore patched bellbottoms and ill-fitting, hand-sewn, embroidered vests. Except us.

The whole reason the entire Wagner family and church followed Grandpa Wagner in his move to Missouri was to spread his vision of Pentecostal Christianity. But the church that Grandpa Wagner wanted to start never materialized. Grandma Wagner, ‘Old Toothless’ as my dad called her, had died sometime around our move. In hindsight, I suspect she was the quiet glue that held the whole church together. She seemed to be a Christian relic from another time. She was a haggard, humorless, stern, frightening woman, and upon her death the whole church, along with the Wagner family disintegrated. Grandpa Wagner eventually married a younger Midwestern woman (‘younger’ meaning mid-40s), and retired to a life of selling his woodcrafts in local art shows. I don’t think he ever preached again.

The Wagner family and church split and went their separate ways in the southeastern Missouri region. Michael Wagner and my mom spent the next couple of years moving from one tiny farm town to another, looking for some kind of employment. We eventually settled in Cape Girardeau, Missouri where I was enrolled in 7th grade. My grades in school had already started to deteriorate before we left New Mexico. In Missouri, they completely tanked. The school bullying increased to an almost unbearable level. The classes in my new school were much larger than the tiny school rooms I was used to in Jemez Valley Elementary, and because I had earlier advanced a grade, I was still the youngest and among the smallest in my class. I was viewed as an outsider, an oddball, and a complete misfit in the Midwest. Public school, for me, was a complete and utter waste of time, and most of my time was just spent trying to avoid trouble. I am ashamed to admit that in being bullied, I sometimes, rarely but sometimes, became myself a bully. In my frustration, I sometimes beat up youngsters who were even weaker than I was – most of those with some kind of mental disability that we all did not mind laughing at. What a miserable and depressing time! In hindsight, I can honestly say that my high school years were by far the worst years of my life.

Those first few years were especially rough. I would sometimes skip school altogether, and instead of taking the school bus, I would walk to the public library and spend the day there. I still loved to read, and the library was my escape portal to the outside world.

July 20th 1976 was a monumental day for me. I had hoped that Viking, the giant probe then orbiting the planet Mars, would land on the planet’s surface on the nation’s Bicentennial, but it eventually landed on the 20th of July. In September, I saw the first pictures from Viking, when a photo of the planet’s surface made the cover of National Geographic. I was astonished. That photo I was looking at was the surface of another world! That tiny red dot in the sky, the wanderer that was named after the Roman god of war looked just like Death Valley in California! The photo I was looking at was of an alien world that no human had ever spoiled with a single footprint or had ever once been gazed upon. The Viking Lander absolutely astounded me in my youth. I desperately wanted to be a part of it, to be associated with something that immense, but had no idea how. Instead, I spent my time skipping as much class as I could get away with.

From what I remember, the religious culture of Cape Girardeau was quite diverse, but was mostly made up of various Pentecostal denominations and some Methodist churches. Of course, everybody in town claimed to be Christian, but I had been taught that most of the churches, especially the large ones that rung bells every day at noon, were dead, lifeless and without the Holy Ghost. They were no better than Catholics. They relied on dry liturgies, formulas, and ritual. My family looked for the smaller churches, those with little organization, and that got their power straight from the Holy Ghost. We found that in Missouri, especially in the backwoods areas, this could be carried to amazing extremes. We visited churches that were frightening even by our own ecstatic, tongue speaking standards. I remember one tiny country church, where a young man, completely out of control while he screamed in tongues, almost lost grip of his baby, which he held coiled in his arm like a football. Such chaotic displays were too much even for my mother. We eventually found a small, but growing ‘non-denominational’ church that was to our liking. I will call it the New Hope Church, led by Pastor Jack. I remember Pastor Jack and people of New Hope to be all very good people. Mom and Michael met many people there in the years we spent at that church, and my mom still has nothing but good things to say about the people there. New Hope welcomed us into their congregation, and most of the friends we made in Missouri were associated with that church. New Hope certainly manifested the spiritual gift of Other Tongues, along with interpretation, and Pastor Jack could certainly get excitable. But the chaos of being Slain in the Spirit and the frightening rants of Grandpa Wagner were over. New Hope seemed much more stable then the tiny, unhinged church that we left in San Ysidro.

My religious beliefs started to fully mature during this time. Jesus was becoming less of my invisible, magical friend, and instead becoming more of a god whom I must learn to obey and worship. It was at New Hope where concepts like the Trinity, the dual natures of Christ, Justification and Sanctification began to find their definition in my mind. The infallibility of the Bible was more emphasized than I had ever heard from Grandpa Wagner. Jesus Christ was God Almighty from eternity past, and was the creator of our Universe. Jesus was the second member of the Trinity, which was the sole nature of God in three Persons, being God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Trinity was analogous to water being in the forms of vapor, liquid and ice – not quite, but good enough a model for a teenager. Adam and Eve were the first humans on the newly created planet. Because of their rebellion, mankind was lost in Sin, and were thenceforth forever separated from the Holy nature of God. But the only Son of the Father, Jesus, because of his love for us, became fully human while somehow still remaining fully divine. Actually, Jesus was sometimes said to have humbled himself and stripped himself of his divinity, and other times was said to be both simultaneously divine and human. Confusing, true, but I did not at the time worry myself with those technicalities. Jesus descended to planet Earth, and as the sinless and perfect man, sacrificed himself to his vengeful Father, to redeem and justify mankind from their Sin. Our human obligation was to repent, turn to God, and accept the sacrifice of His only Son, thus rejecting our own inherent sinful nature, so we could become fully acceptable to His holy nature. The Bible was the sole authority of our knowledge of God, our sinful nature, and his gift of Salvation. The Bible was inspired and inerrant, meaning it was without error, and above doubt, question and critique.

Quite what this all meant, I don’t think I was fully sure. But I fully believed it all. I had no choice but to believe it. I might as well have tried not believing in my own Being as to not believe in what I was taught about God, Jesus, the Bible, and the predicament of His creation. It was the only paradigm I knew. I was vaguely aware that other religions existed, including dead and heretical Christian denominations and Catholicism, but I had little reason to consider them, at least not until my curiosity got the better of me in my last year of high school. My Christian Beliefs were the only Necessary Beliefs and there was no need or desire to question them. If somebody had asked me why I believed what I did, I don’t know what my answer would have been. I suspect the very question would have puzzled me. Why ask? The thought of even asking for reasons was beyond my religious horizon. I lived the life of pure Faith. There was no reason. It simply Was.

We continued to believe in the near return of Jesus in the form of the Rapture, and the beginning of the Great Tribulation, which was the seven-year reign of the Beast, popularly known as the Anti-Christ, upon Earth. A popular and amazingly influential writer named Hal Lindsey was becoming well known during this time. Nearly everybody read, or at least owned, his books The Late Great Planet Earth, Satan is Alive and Well, and There’s a New World Coming. These books, which were Lindsey’s interpretation of the Apocalyptic books of Daniel and Revelation and implausibly read into newspaper headlines, formed the backbone of many of Pastor Jack’s sermons. Instead of Grandpa Wagner’s hellfire rants, Pastor Jack calmly lectured us, with the aid of an overhead projector, the confusing interpretations of the bowls, seals, trumpets and other bizarre apocalyptic imagery. I did not understand much of it, except that the imagery of impending Holy War and the End of the Age was very frightening. I remember one sermon in particular, that I thought demonstrated the amazing prophetic vision of the Bible. Pastor Jack, with the aid of maps and hand drawn pictures on his overhead projector, showed how the blessing of Moses:

And of Asher he said, [Let] Asher [be] blessed with children; let him be acceptable to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oil. Thy shoes [shall be] iron and brass; and as thy days, [so shall] thy strength [be]
– Deut 33:24-25.

was actually a prediction of some newly discovered Israeli oil wells located somewhere near Mt Tabor, which amazingly enough was in the ‘toe’ portion of the boot-shaped Asher. Most maps show Zebulon and Issachar to be where Pastor Jack included Asher, and I am not sure if oil was ever found near Mt Tabor, but we were quite impressed nevertheless. Driving home I told mom I was amazed by Pastor Jack’s sermon and demonstration that the Bible could predict the future so accurately. She agreed.

I owned a comic book, which summarized the popular apocalyptic beliefs of New Hope Church in the late 1970s. Surprisingly enough, it was made by the same people who put out Archie Comics, and I was shocked when I saw it again on the Internet. This comic, which I must have read a million times, is a good synopsis of my view of the impending world, and how to avoid being damned in the crossfire, by our loving Savior Jesus. I also find it quite nostalgic. I owned lots of these Spire Christian Comics, including The Hiding Place, Tom Landry and the Dallas Cowboys and Hello, I'm Johnny Cash. While not as horrific in worldview as Chick Tracks, they accurately represent my Fundamentalist beliefs of that time. Like Chick Tracks, I probably got the majority of my theology from memorable comics like these. Check them out.

Looking back, and comparing my young years of Christianity in New Mexico to those in Missouri, I can detect very subtle changes in our spiritual lives. Life in Missouri was immensely more complicated than the relatively simple, yet primitive desert life of New Mexico. As Fundamentalist as New Hope was, Grandpa Wagner and his home Pentecostal church offered a life of unquestioned absolutes. Things were simple when there was a single Holy Ghost, Fire Breathing, Tongue Speaking, Miracle and Healing Pentecostal church and a single heretical Satanic Catholic church in the town. Things were uncomplicated in the desert, where we made a simple living by selling goat milk and cheese to the hippies who came down from the Jemez mountains to our humble, mud-brick home. We were Holy Ghost empowered because we could be. We could sing and dance to homemade Gospel songs all night, with not a care in the world. Our penniless, Jesus Freak, hippy lifestyle was a temporary life in an alternate universe. Things were different in Missouri. Suddenly, family obligations became more demanding. Mortgages and bills had to be paid, and laws requiring children to be in school were enforced. Somehow, the Holy Ghost Fire that we had in New Mexico vanished. There were more outside influences from the larger population of Cape Girardeau, more religious diversity to contend with and alternate points of view. Mom and her three children were getting older. Our religion, though still Pentecostal, was becoming even more formulaic. The wild Jesus Freaks from New Mexico were becoming domesticated. Innocence was not quite lost, but she was slipping away like a dream.

As a born-again Christian, I was supposed to be living a life of sanctification, and continually emboldened and made into the image of Jesus by the power of the Holy Ghost. But in truth, there was nothing special about this Born Again child of God. I was a very confused, somewhat rebellious, hormonally driven, misfit teenager. School was a continued source of torment. I was certainly smart enough, but I was apathetic. I was given no direction for my future by my parents, pastor or school. I simply drifted by, trying to avoid others. I was to graduate high school in the summer of 1981, but I flunked one too many basic algebra courses. I was simultaneously enthralled by Carl Sagan’s PBS series Cosmos, intrigued by Steve Allen’s other PBS series Meeting of the Minds, yet I could not pass a stupid math class, and had to repeat my entire senior year of high school. My continued depression sank me to crushing lows. Mom was at wits end. As ashamed of myself as I was, I fought with mom against sending me back to Cape Central High School for another year. I could not bear another year of torment in that school. Mom finally and reluctantly enrolled me in a small private school owned by a Baptist church, which we had never attended.

I spent my final year of high school enrolled in Cape Baptist Christian School (again - a bogus name), the smallest school I would ever attend. This was my first time being affiliated with the Baptist denomination, and I again stepped into another world of religious stagnation.

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Conversions and De-conversions – Learning the Script

The seeds of my eventual de-conversion were already in place in my young life. I was not introduced to religious belief until after I had explored the western United States with my family. I had enough of an understanding of science, particularly Evolution, to allow that seed to germinate over many years, only to blossom when I became an adult. I was also very good at finding patterns, particularly in the behavior of my new religious family. Perhaps my Christian beliefs were doomed from the beginning.

I only remember a few things that my newly converted mother said to me concerning her new Jesus Freak beliefs:

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“Mom, isn’t Grandma going to Heaven?”

“No. I am afraid not. She has not been born again.”

“But she is good. She knows about churches. She taught me! Here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors…”

“That does not matter. Even if she goes to church, it does not matter. She has not been born again. She does not know Jesus”

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A fundraiser for starving, sub-Saharan Africans is showing on television. We have all seen them. Emaciated woman clutching onto fly covered toddlers with distended bellies. Some sick and filthy children with crusty eyes are eating food from relief workers that looks something like what we slopped the pigs with. And for your gift of only 25 cents per day, the price of a cup of coffee, you can feed one desperate child. Mom cuts split ends from her hair while she considers their terrible plight.

“Oh dear. They need Jesus. If only they knew Jesus.”

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Mom spoke to me one evening by the warmth of the wood stove, “Remember, we will live in heaven forever. Do you know how long ‘forever’ is? Imagine a boulder of granite. Not that soft sandstone like we have here, but the hardest rock you can imagine. Imagine a boulder that is 1000 feet on ever side. A huge boulder, 1000 feet long, 1000 feet high and 1000 feet deep. Imagine that every 1000 years a bird lands on the boulder, sharpens its beak on the boulder, and then flies off. A bird sharpens its beak on the boulder every thousand years. When that boulder of granite is finally worn down from those tiny birds sharpening their beaks on it, then that is when only 1 day has passed in Heaven. Can you imagine that?”

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This was smattering of the things I heard from my mother during those early years of belief. I was very young, and my Christian theology was infantile. I had no conception of Trinity, Christology or any other form of theological sophistication. My beliefs did not come from the pulpit of Grandpa Wagner, since I remember few specifics any of his Holy Ghost empowered rants. Basically, I all knew in that time of early belief was that there was a Man who lived in Heaven, named Jesus. Jesus used to live on Earth long, long ago, but he was killed because of who he was, but he came alive again, then he rose up into Heaven. Heaven was up there, beyond the clouds. Maybe Heaven was even beyond the planets that I was learning about from my astronomy poster. Heaven was where Jesus lived with his Father, whose name was God, and that was where we would go when we died. Jesus loved me very much, and I was to love him back because he died for me. Jesus could do anything, but he also wanted to spend time with me and be my friend. He wanted to play with me and would protect me while I was exploring the desert or swimming in the irrigation ditch. He could read my mind. He could tell what I was thinking, and if my thoughts were good or bad. Jesus did not want me to sin. This meant that he did not want me to lie, cheat, steal, kill or do anything else wrong. I could not smoke (like my dad), cuss (like my dad), gamble (like dad) or drink (like dad). I could not play with myself. Witches were evil, and I could not watch TV shows like Bewitched. I could not think bad thoughts, because Jesus could always tell what I was thinking. I could always pray to Jesus because he was my friend. If I wanted to go to Heaven, I had to Repent and become Born Again. It did not matter how good I was, it just mattered that I was Born Again. If I was not Born Again, I would go to Hell and burn forever. There was a bad guy who flew around trying to make me do bad things. His name was The Devil, or Satan. He was God’s enemy, but apparently if we prayed loud enough, we could ‘bind’ The Devil, and then The Devil couldn’t do anything bad to us. Jesus was going to come back very, very soon, and take all of us up into the clouds with him, and the world would end.

That is about it. Most of my theology in those years came from bits and pieces I picked up from hear and there, my own wishful thinking, and Chick Tracks, which were starting to become very popular. These short, cartoon pamphlets were much more memorable than any sermon I heard from church, or from our hymnals or Bible readings. They were easy for me to read, the drawings were funny, and they were amazingly memorable. I could read them over and over, and let the propaganda sink deep into my psyche. I am not sure where these tracts came from, or who brought them into our church, but my favorites were Holy Joe, Big Daddy, and This Was Your Life, Somebody Loves Me, and A Demon’s Nightmare. I encourage anybody reading this who is not familiar with Chick Tracts to click on the links and check out my gradeschool reading material. I seriously doubt any o my Catholic friends know what these are, but they were very common in homes and tent revivals during the early-mid 1970s. Looking back at these things, I cannot believe what a warped mockery they make of the world. It is almost as if the movie Constantine was a documentary.

[note – it looks like Big Daddy has been heavily revised since I read it as a kid. The first and last few panels are the same, the stuff in the middle looks like all updated material. Luckily, the frame which explains that the binding force of atomic nuclei is actually Jesus is still in the comic.]

Our ‘church’, if it can be called that, was usually led by Grandpa Wagner, but anybody else, as long as they were male, could fill in if they desired. We sometimes met outside by the horse tank if we planned on a water baptism; sometimes we met in a friend’s house. Usually though, our church met in a small adobe house down the road from ours, where the front room had enough space for about 30 people. Grandpa Wagner fashioned himself as the pastor of our tiny church, and his sermons were usually some extrapolation from a Biblical verse or two, and usually included yelling, jumping, and stamping his feet on the floor in fits of passion. I remember him preaching on things like the fact that we would never be good enough to go to Heaven, the filling of the Holy Ghost, demon possession, and Jesus’ soon return from Heaven to judge the Earth. I remember only the most primitive theology being preached by him, and I doubt he had anything more to offer. The songs that we sang from old hymnals were not memorable to me, but I remember that our singing was accompanied with a guitar, accordion, and about a dozen tambourines. During and after singing, everybody would speak, sometimes very loudly, in ‘Tongues’. I always felt strange watching my mother chant in this strange way. The scene was always chaotic. Everybody stood, lifted their arms and cried as the otherworldly language took hold of them. Sometimes all control was lost. People would occasionally fall and gyrate on the floor. Sometimes they did this while crying, other times while laughing, singing or screaming. On rare occasions, somebody had ‘demons’ cast out of them by Grandpa Wagner and the congregation.

We often drove in a caravan to traveling tent crusades and revivals in the neighboring town of Bernallilo and even in Albuquerque. These must have been hugely popular in the wake of the Jesus Movement in the early 1970’s because I remember lots of these things. It was usually an odd mix of the older, more conservative Evangelical trying to accept the younger crowd of fervent, long-haired Jesus Freaks sharing their space. Our church once caravanned all the way up to Farmington to watch Rex Humbard perform at one of his healing crusades. I don’t remember seeing Kathryn Kuhlman, but I do remember mom saying she saw her, and that she performed the healing miracle of lengthening a man’s leg. Mom recounted the story, with astonishment and wonder, of seeing the miracle with her very own eyes I also remember watching some kid, not much older than myself, preach every night for a week, in some community hall in Albuquerque. He was billed as the world’s youngest evangelist, one of probably dozens billed in the same way, and he was certainly dynamic. I remember leaving each night, and listening to adults as they marveled at his miraculous gifts of the Spirit. I remember this young boy, dressed in shirt and tie, as he marched up and down the aisle between folding chairs, preach with the confidence of a veteran. At the end of each service, we would form a long line in front of him, so he could place his hand on us, pray, and we would then be ‘Slain in the Spirit’. Of course, I had been slain in the spirit many times, by Grandpa Wagner and by numerous other traveling evangelists, and because everybody was wailing and bemoaning their own sin and unworthy state, my own face was almost always hot and wet with tears. But I will never forget the knot in my throat as this child placed his hands on mom’s head and yelled, as she fell over backwards to be caught by some assistants. I also remember my own strange feeling as hands were placed on me, and I knew, as if reading a script for a play, that this was the time in which I was to fall over and be ‘Slain’. So fall over I did. And I would lie there as people stepped around my prostrate body and the pandemonium continued.

Patterns. I started to see patterns in the chaos. Somewhere in the frenzy of these revivals, I detected a subtle script that was nevertheless being followed. Was I just part of an act?

I remember more than once, consciously deciding to not fall when hands were placed on me. I was not trying to be rebellious, I was just trying to detect the power of the Holy Ghost. I was a firm believer in Jesus, but I had a sense that I was being slain only because everybody else around me was being slain, and falling over was something that was just expected of me. The evangelist placed his hands on the forehead of a praying believer, sometimes with his finger dipped in a bit of oil, and after a second or two, and on cue, the believer would slowly tip over backward. It seemed suspiciously rehearsed. I once heard a story about an obstinate man who braced himself with his leg so he would not be slain, and his leg ended up broken. So I did not brace myself by placing my leg behind me, I just stood there as the evangelist placed his hands on my forehead and prayed. I consciously did not fall. I half expected him to keep trying, to pray even harder, to throw a command at me. But no, he simply passed over me to the next person in line.

So, at a very young age, as a young Christian who loved Jesus, I learned that my being Slain in the Spirit was a function of the crowd around me. I imagined everybody in the crowd, including mom, falling over at the command of the evangelist, overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit. I could tell that I was not falling over by any power other than my own, rather I was only doing it because momentum from the believing crowd encouraged me to. This was one of the first things of a critical and skeptical nature that I picked up on as a very young Christian.

I could not, at the time, imagine any psychological trickery going on. I could see the script that was being followed, and I could read the patterns that were being laid out in each service, but I did not think to imagine if anybody could be Slain in the Spirit without the emotional crowd present, say in the privacy of the pastor’s office. My critique of the situation made me imagine that there was something wrong, not with the crowd, not with the religion, but with me. Perhaps my Faith in Jesus was not strong enough, or that I was not truly sincere in my belief, and I just compensated by allowing myself to fall over in order to fool everybody else. I imagined all my friends and family around me, being legitimately overwhelmed by the power of the Holy Ghost, all control of the bodies being taken over by divine command, while I had to be content with merely imitating everybody else. I did not feel too guilty over this particular lapse of faith however - that would come later. Relief was in sight from my friend Dino. I remember once laying on the floor after being Slain, eyes shut, then opening to look Dino, Grandpa Wagner’s young grandson, who was lying next to me.

“sssshhh” he quietly whispered. “Keep your eyes shut”.

OK. I was not the only one pretending.

Still, I could not help thinking that there was something wrong with me. It was not only the fact that I felt I was following a script when I was Slain in the Spirit, it was that I could not, to my shame, yet Speak with Other Tongues.

Our church taught, along with many other Pentecostals, that since Jeuss promised that his followers would speak with tongues and drive out demons (Mark 16:17), it then followed that only those that did show this evidence were truly saved and going to heaven. Everybody in our church spoke in tongues, including my mother. I had certainly seen demons cast out of people by the congregation. But I could not Speak in Tongues. I never could. I cannot count the number of altar calls I tearfully accepted, just in case I was not sincere enough the last time I tearfully accepted an altar call. I do not know how many times I was baptized in the river or horse tank, trying to show my willingness to be Faithful to Jesus, whom I was supposed to love. It did not matter that everybody in our church regularly accepted altar calls, repented, and was dunked (our chuch was tiny after all). None of that mattered. The fact was, I could not bring myself to Speak in Tongues. I was very troubled with my inability to be filled with the Holy Ghost and speak with Other Tongues much more than my own faults at being Slain in the Spirit.

Some of us kids used to meet in one of our bedrooms and ‘play’ church. I would whip out my Children’s Picture Bible and tell some story of the Biblical Patriarchs or something, then we would all sing a few songs. Once during playtime, Dino, my troublesome friend, started speaking in tongues in a mocking manner.

“Dino, stop! You are going to get us in trouble!”
“Shandalahai!”
“Stop it Dino!”
“C’mon, speaking in tongues is easy! Shandalahai!”

“Shandalahai. Shandalahai la la Shandala la la da Shandalahai.”

I picked up more patterns at my young age. Even though I was troubled by my inability to Speak in Tongues, I could detect that the language as spoken by my church mostly consisted of the same words and syllables repeated over and over. Even by mom. Some variation of ‘Shandalahai’ seemed to be a favorite. And Dino was just mischevious enough to not only pick up on that, like I did, but also mock it.

“Shandalahai! Everybody does it this way!”

Still, like being Slain in the Spirit, I refused to just read the Script. I did not want to follow the crowd and just chant “Shandalahai” over and over. I wanted to be filled with the Holy Ghost, and I sincerely desired the power of the Holy Ghost to take over my body and speak through me. I was intensely conscious of my own actions.

Once, during some service, I asked Grandpa Wagner and the congregation to pray for me so that I could be filled with the Holy Ghost and speak with new tongues.

What followed was a cacophony of prayers, chanting, yelling, urging, hand-laying, and demon-binding. Voices rose and shouting began. I cried. They yelled. My face and tears were hot. I tried to loosen my throat, to allow my tongue to flap of its own will. Voices urging me amidst the pandemonium of prayer, “Just let it out! Just let it out! Pray with other tongues, in Jesus name!” I pleaded with God. “Please God. Please Jesus. Fill me with the Holy Ghost. Come into my body! Please save me! Please save me! Let me speak in Tongues!! Please!

I cried, I prayed, I begged. They shouted, they prayed, they urged me on. Finally, I just let my tongue smack against the roof of my mouth.

“…duh duh du du do do du du do do dud dudududu dodoodoud dou do duo du do…”

Shouting! Cheering! Rejoicing! Everybody clapped. I continued to stammer with my eyes shut, tears flowing, flushed, drained, but with arms raised in praise to my Jesus. Jesus, who had finally given me the gift of the Holy Spirit!

“…du do do du du du do do dodood dudo…”

But why did I not speak with anything that sounded like words? I could do nothing but repeatedly stammer. Grandpa Wagner reassured me. I was just in the baby stages of speaking in Tongues, and just like a baby who babbles, my spiritual speech would soon develop into a full language. Very soon now. Very soon. I was relieved.

I remember several weeks had gone by. For a very short time, I freely and proudly spoke with other Tongues, because I felt that I had finally recieved that power from the Holy Ghost. After the prescribed number hymns were sung, and the proper intensity of prayer was reached, we would all stand to our feet, we would all raise are arms, and without any verbal commands but on cue nonetheless, we would all Speak in the Tongues of Angels, in unison. While the more mature believers wailed forth, ‘Shandalahai!’, I finally felt like a true believer with all of them, as I lifted my own arms, half bent at the elbows, eyes shut, and quietly spoke to God in my spiritual language of stammering utterances. But my babblings never developed into a language. Several weeks went by, and I continued to stammer. I felt no language developing and no maturity in my speech. I think I was just relieved that I could do it, and do it before witnesses. But after several weeks, I quit speaking in tongues. I tried it, and I had not advanced beyond a baby language, so I must have felt dissatisfied with it. I never attempted to Speak in Tongues again. I was satisfied with what I had. I was convinced that I had been filled with the Holy Ghost as evidenced by my speech. I could let it pass.

At a very young age, I could recognize the unwritten and unspoken patterns in Christian worship, prayer, hymn singing and fellowship. They were obvious to me, and would become only more obvious as my Christian life developed. I could tell when people would become Slain in the Spirit, and under what conditions. I could tell when people would speak in Tongues, what their speech would sound like, how long it would last, who would stand up to give some kind of interpretation, and what that interpretation would be. Even as a very young Christian, fully intent on living to please Jesus, I could see patterns of behavior, and these patterns just allowed me to the memorize the Script of Christian behavior that we all followed.

But I did not make the connection that something was wrong with the belief. That was not thought of. It was simply out of the range of possibility. Rather, something was wrong with me. I was never Faithful enough. Lord, I believe, help my unbelief!

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