When I Spoke in Tongues Quotes

“Praise God," he whispered. “He kept you safe. You had your other accident to stop you from that."

My heart flared up in my chest, and for a moment I felt myself leaping back into the world of magical thinking, the universe as a series of divine interventions. There but for the grace of God. Maybe God was protecting me after all. Perhaps I had been spared. But if God had maneuvered events in such a way that my previous accident had kept me alive, why didn't he do as much for those who had died?”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“Whenever I visited, I felt like I was going back in time, funneling back to an America I didn't think much about anymore. An America of fields and farms and barns and clapboard churches, where children said yes ma'am and no ma'am, where strangers greeted each other with a nod in the grocery stores, where chances were that every stranger you met had some relation in common with someone you already knew.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“Mrs. Afolabi adre me if I was a Christian. I knew what she was asking: Are you a good person? Can I trust you? I hedged and then answered yes, ignoring the unsettled feeling that rose up in me when I said those words. The typical Christian testimony was one of being lost, then found. But my own testimony ran backward. I had been found once, but somewhere along the way I had gotten lost.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“lately I'd been thinking about the girl I used to be. The zealot. Scrawny and shy, seventy-five pounds soaking wet, operating with the only currency she had. She knew she wasn't enough on her own. She needed to make allegiances. She wanted power, the kind that heals the sick and raises the dead and lifts small girls from backwoods farm towns into the glittering, bustling, half-evil world. A world that for all its faults was still beloved to God.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“Hallelujah,” he said quietly, and put his arms on my shoulders while the elders smiled behind him in a proprietary way. In a booming voice he told me he had a prophecy for me. He said that God had ordained that I would be a writer, and I would write my first book by the time I was sixteen. He even had a vision of what it would look like: a slim, ivory-colored volume with a portrait of Jesus on the cover. I was thrilled, but not at all surprised. I was used to living in a magical world, so it didn't surprise me that God had whispered in this fragrant man's ear and sent him in my direction.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“She wanted strangers to know God's love, so how much more did she want that for me? But instead of getting the daughter she deserved, who would be happy and satisfied with life in the county and marriage to a God-fearing man, she got a daughter who rolled her eyes when she was the unwilling recipient of lengthy prayers. But that didn't stop my mother from trying to bridge the gap. She loved me and wanted me to have access to the faith that had given her so much comfort. Above all she wanted us to be together in eternity.

Before I walked away from the church, my family and I used to look in the same direction, toward the same sun. We believed there was one God and he was looking on us with love, because we were his children and we followed his commandments. There were those on the margins-my aunt who smoked cigarettes, Catholics, or the people who went to the mosque across the street from the hospital. But no one in our community would actually deny the existence of God.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“I had never been able to look at that picture without feeling the weight of everything I had lost. I knew there was no path back to the time when I believed in God with the innocence of a child. We weren't the same family anymore, and I wasn't the same girl who plunged herself into the blue-tinged chlorinated water of that baptismal font, pinching her nose and holding her breath, praying to be touched by the Spirit.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“The sanctuary was a foreign world to him. He had never seen candles before, or preschool-aged angels with lopsided ponytails. He would never fall asleep during a long Sunday evening service, his head resting on his father's lap, a suit jacket covering him like a blanket. He'd probably never lie awake in his bed at night, mulling over the mystery of the Holy Trinity or puzzling over New Testament parables. He wouldn't know the heady power you gained from cleaving close to God and keeping his commandments. He'd probably never live his life in a state of siege, convinced that every earthly action has a heavenly consequence.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“I became aware of a faint, slippery shape between us, the ghost of the woman I could have been. She looked like me—messy ponytail at a precarious angle—but she had a fat blond baby on her lap and a toddler leaning against her thigh. She was a stranger to the world of graduate school, of copy machines and laser printers, of meetings and deadlines. She and my mother were natural confidantes. The woman's toddler was up late with an earache, but my mother's suggestion about a hot bath worked wonders. They traded stories about the day, made plans for a birthday party. Their houses were close enough that they could drop off things from the grocery store that had been purchased two for one, on sale. But instead my mother was stuck with me, nodding at my stories in a distracted way and not asking questions.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“Good people voted Republican, the party of family values, and went to church on Sunday. When women had children, they quit their jobs and stayed home like the mothers they were meant to be. Men belonged with women and women with men. Everyone seemed to share the belief that the country was on a downward spiral and only prayer and divine intervention would set things right again.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“Our God was a God of great power and great authority, and the world danced on his axis, not our own. If I had forgotten all of that, then it was no wonder I'd also forgotten that the Devil's agents were everywhere among us, scratching and crawling at our edges, searching for a way to get inside.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“When I was a girl experiencing it for the first time, that rollicking religion seemed to have come organically, from the world itself, like water or air. Pentecostals aren't much for history, and the only origin story I'd ever heard was the story of how the Holy Spirit had descended on Jesus's disciples centuries ago when they gathered to mourn his death.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“Let me pray for you," my mother said. I said okay. Her voice steeled up a bit, and she asked God to protect me and walk with me. I didn't close my eyes, just tucked the receiver against my ear and looked out the window. A laughing couple threw snowballs at each other in the quad. When I finally hung up the phone, longing and shame tightened around my stomach like a belt. I thought of something my father had told me last summer. Apparently he'd walked into the kitchen to make himself a plate of something and he found my mother crying near the sink. She was crying over me and my future, as she had before and would again. She could only guess at what made up my life, far away in New England, but she knew it wasn't the life she would have chosen for me. My father could be tender when he needed to be and he said he had calmed her down, poured her a glass of iced tea. When she was feeling better he asked her what she thought I'd do when I finished school. He said she fixed him with those ice-blue eyes of hers and said, “Well, I guess she'll come home and be one of us again.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“When I received my prayer language, it felt like proof the Holy Spirit had X-rayed my life from up in heaven and called it good. It was my key to the kingdom, my guarantee that when the seventh trumpet sounded and Jesus returned in a cloud of glory, I'd be summoned up to meet the faithful. But now, four years later, I was ready to turn that key in. It had become too heavy. If I kept carrying it around, then I couldn't pick up anything else. So I sat there in the bathroom at that church in Baltimore and whispered to God that I was bowing out. To soften the blow and make it less terrifying, I told God I was taking a sabbatical from believing. A break. I'd probably be back, but for now I needed to go off on my own.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“As hundreds of people swayed to the soft and guitars, lifting their hands to the Lord and murmuring praise under their breath, a woman with low hoarse voice delivered a word over the church. She claimed, years from that day, the congregation would triple and need to move yet again. The news traveled like electricity around that mauve sanctuary, and everyone around me squeezed their eyes closed and murmured their gratitude to God. Their voices rose again and I knew more prophecies were coming. But my right temple began to throb, and the sanctuary started to feel less like a temple and more like a cage. A refrain echoed and buzzed in my head: None of this is true.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss

“I wanted to fall too, more than anything. But when my turn came and the pastor pushed at my forehead and the deacons stood behind me at the ready, my legs refused to give out. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to put my thoughts to sleep. I knew that if I could just let go, then I could get the blessing too. But my mind darted around and I couldn't get a handle on it… And then the thought flashed through my head: maybe I couldn’t fall because my belief wasn't pure; it was salt and pepper mixed together. I had all these nagging questions and doubts, and that must have been why the Spirit passed me by.”
― Jessica Wilbanks, When I Spoke in Tongues: A Story of Faith and Its Loss