The Gift of Tongues

Note: For anyone who is not familiar with my situation as I write this (like me, reading this five years from now), I happen to be in Germany at the moment.

On Sunday, one of the counsellors in the bishopric handed me a card asking me to say the closing prayer on February first. He told me that I could say it in English. I adamantly refused.

And that's when a light went off.

I didn't want to say it in English because doing so seemed like a wasted opportunity to speak in German. And what I realized is that wanting to do something is a part of the gift for actually doing that thing.

I then realized a whole bunch of stuff that I had known for a long time but had never quite put together this way. A talk, of sorts, began to form in my mind, so that is what I've written below.

We know, or we should know, that spiritual gifts are given for the building up of the kingdom of God. Heavenly Father wants us to all help one another, like we were all parts of the same body, so he gave each a gift which the others need. (On a side note, I believe that we all have opportunities to be part of the liver, meaning that we have chances to take poison out of the whole system by processing it properly and not passing it on. That is a gift of the Savior's, which I believe He expects each of us to develop.)

The gift of tongues could be compared to an enzyme; it allows ínteractions which would happen anyway to happen faster, and it allows some interactions to happen which would not have otherwise.

There is, of course, the highest level of the gift of tongues such as was exhibited in ancient times on he day of Pentecost: a day when all who were gathered had the Holy Ghost to such a strong degree that they could every one of them understand the speaker without translation, and without having to study the language he was speaking in. This sort of event, as I'm sure you have noticed, is cool, fancy, and extremely rare.

The much more common gift is a gift for learning quickly. That's the one I've got, and that's the one I got an insight in to on Sunday. Here are the parts of it that I know about so far:

1. Lack of physical or mental impairments, such as a hearing problem, language delay, processing problems, and so on. These are not hard to imagine. If one works on such a weakness, however, it can become a great strength, particularly when it comes to teaching others.
2. Desire to learn, which for me pans out as enjoyment in learning. I believe that this can come in different ways. I had a truly great German teacher in Jr. High and High School, who sparked my love of language learning; later, at BYU, I ended up with an Arabic teacher who fed the fire, causing me to spend about twice as much time studying for Arabic class than I had for anything else in my life so far. Whenever someone asks me if learning Arabic was hard (though I do not mean to imply that I am done learning it), I always say "It was lots of hard work, but it was fun work."
3. Meta-knowledge in the realm of language learning. Meta-knowledge means knowledge about knowledge. I took my first language-teaching class when I was still taking Arabic, and while it made me a pretty bratty student (I was critical of almost everything my teacher was doing-- different teacher, by the way), it really did help me learn the language faster to think about how to apply research on language learning. Now that I have, myself, taught English as a Second Language for a year, I find that my ability to analyze my own weaknesses in speaking and writing German is strengthened.
4. Willingness and ability to put all of this to work. I knew how to study languages before I got here, but at the moment I am learning much faster than I have in the past eight years at least, because I am truly in an immersion environment.

So. Sorry this is such a long post. I was reading the Sunday School lesson yesterday (Monday), and thinking about spritual gifts, and this is what I came up with:

1. Joseph Smith was born into a family which was open-minded on religious matters. His father wouldn't join a church because he didn't feel right about it. Religion was an open topic in their home.
2. Nonetheless, his family was very interested in religion. (A certain portion of what gifts we have does come from environment, though of course as we get older we can exercise influence over that environment.) They lived in a generally religious community, and they themselves read the Bible as a family every day. And, of course, Joseph was very concerned about the things he heard; he wanted to be saved, but he wasn't sure how that would happen.
3. Joseph's spark came from a bit of meta-knowledge from the book of James about spiritual knowledge.
4. He was both willing and able to put the knowledge he gained to use.

Ta-da! That's it. I haven't had much time to think about other gifts (maybe scripture study today...) but I would love to have comments on this one.

SAC