For Part 1, click here
Another observation occurred to me concerning places and languages.
I have a setting: In Uganda, we have many tribes, hence many languages.
The central region is called Buganda and is predominantly populated by Baganda who speak Luganda. However, since the capital is here, we have many tribes coexisting within.
My maternal side is itesot (from the North East), but many settled (and got married within Buganda). They are as well employed here.
What I found astonishing is the itch; that drives them to speak the little Luganda they know amidst their sentences whether they are speaking English or ateso!
I recall a friend called Olara in high school. He came from the North, where they speak Acholi and Luo. He was in a Bugandan school. In our first year, all he could speak was English! Pure, crystaline English! But by the time we were in advanced level, the sixth year — I can’t recall the exact moment, but he was speaking perfect Luganda!
Mind you we had no Luganda classes throughout!
That led me to conclude that a place imprints a language on someone whether they like it or not! Even foreigners who live in a specific spot for many years end up adapting whether they like it or not. It takes too much pride not to! The place seems to have an influence of its own. A language of its own!
I will take this still to the point I hard-lined in part one; maybe, just maybe; if you are struggling to receive the gift of tongues, among the other reasons I mentioned, I think you just need to stay in a place where that language is commonplace.
Proverbs 13:20 states that He who walks with the wise will in the long run become wise. Public speakers state that if you hang around 5 fools you’ll become the 6th. I believe language follows the same maxim. Yes, one may not be originally a Muganda, but if they speak the language perfectly, they will get automatically included!
Maybe the power to save, isn’t about you most times; maybe it’s about the place you are! If you were in Egypt during the 7 years of famine, the language of famine to you would not be as barbarous as it was to nations far away! If famine caused two women to decide on eating their children in Samaria centuries later, I imagine the practice was still a possibility somewhere in Pharaoh’s era.
But if these women had an option of food within reach, they would have sold themselves as slaves — for food. That then would shift the burden of food searching from them to their Egyptian masters!
So even if places can define languages, and influence or imprint them on someone, that person still has a choice to accept the language or not. Maybe they consider it backward or ashaming, or tiresome to learn!
That is on them, especially if the language comes with benefits especially for our context! If you are believing for tongues, they are closer than you think! Unless if you are still biased about them —
However, if the language is not beneficial, or proves to be a bit of opposing to the subject, they can — as already elucidated — choose to operate under their own influence.
You see, if I divert a-bit; language is not only limited to how we speak, but how we act, live or believe! Poverty is a language as well! Stagnation is a language. For these cases, we consider the factor that affects places before language; and that is people.
Baganda are firstly people, before they identify themselves by language. So that is why Isaac influenced the language of impossibilities during the famine! He sowed and reaped a hundred fold. While everyone around cried of drought!
Whether systems he put in place, whether it was the blessing, these all need a man to drive or influence them too! So as people cry that your country is third world, even if you are living in it, you can be a first class citizen! People have the power to influence places; places have the power to influence languages, and these languages in turn influence other people.
This article is therefore double-edged. Firstly; giving a hack to getting a heavenly language effortlessly ‘learnt’, secondly: defining what influences the other from within an individual to the world.
Lastly, even if people influence places, something internal influences people; and not considering others, I pin ‘mindset’ as one that’s on top. Long ago, when there was only one language, the people had one mindset — inclined to the mission of building a tower that would reach Heaven, and God Himself said nothing could stop them from achieving this; mainly because they believed they could!
If you are convinced that the Spirit has not withheld this gift from you; if you believe it, if you have believed that you have it, before you even have it … if you pitch your tent in that place … when your speech is one with your mindset or imagination … then that place’s language will have no choice, but imprint on you. And just as God said at the tower, I’m sure it will be said … nothing you imagined to do was withheld from you!
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