Speaking In Tongues
A
few days
thereafter, that female colleague
approached me and shared that she had always wondered what Christians meant by
"speaking in tongues." She said she now knows what speaking in tongues means,
then pressed her lips together and nodded once while smiling at me. I pressed my
lips together and smiled
back without affirming or refuting her
assessment of the guttural noise that Kristin made when the demons are being cast out of
her. Kristin laughed when I relayed my colleague's assessment.
We looked for a secluded place outdoor where we could cast out demons, but China has a lot of people, and they were everywhere, even in remote corners of the local parks. They were also more inquisitive about weird noises, especially when compared to the people in the southeast Asian country where we had been, which was so full of violence and weird things happening that people cared less about strange noises.
Once, I booked Kristin overnight at a nice hotel that had thick walls so that she can have a day of spa treatment and make all the guttural noise she wants in her room. When she returned the next day, she said that when the demons made the guttural noise at night, she heard noise outside her room, looked through the peephole in her door and saw a bunch of Chinese people facing her door and talking among themselves, probably wondering about the nature of the noise coming from her room.
Within walking distance from my university was a freeway overpass with a pedestrian walkway. We soon discovered that the pedestrian traffic on that overpass thins out after about 11 PM, and began to cast out demons thereafter while standing on the pedestrian walkway near the center of that overpass. The traffic noise drowned out the noise of spiritual warfare, which we could pause when pedestrians approached us from either side. After a couple of hours of that, we were exhausted, covered in freeway soot, and walked back to our apartment, where Kristin often curled up in my arms and just cried.