Tongues.

It's amazing to me what effect the tongue has on our lives. Many times the tongue is mentioned as a danger in the Bible, difficult to control and liable to hurt folks around us. It also allows us to swallow food, pronounce words, and taste wonderful flavors.

Lately, my tongue has been a stumbling block for me in that it's used to pronouncing words in American English, and it's a bit of a stretch to get it to do the acrobatics that Romanian requires of it. Normally, it's not too much of a problem, but there are certain words and letters that give me grief. Mainly, it's the letter "r."

When I say an "r" in English, I barely use my tongue. It's at the bottom of my mouth, and I pull it back just a little bit. No heavy work. In Romanian, I press it against the back of the roof of my mouth and hold it fairly stiff, or trill it a bit. Not a sound I'm used to making very often. I thank God and my teachers that I started speaking Spanish early and was at least made aware that "r" can sound like that, but I'm still not used to it. Especially when it's shoved in between "t" and "u" like in "pentru" (for), "patru" (four), "centru" (center), and various other words. When I pronounce "t," my tongue is pressing hard at the front of the roof of my mouth and my lips are pretty open. Then, it has to move backwards quickly and either push or trill on the back of the roof of my mouth. Finally, I push my lips into a circle and bring my tongue back even further and down. It feels like my tongue has to do a long sprint to say simple things like "grupa patru" (group number four) or "pentru tine" (for you).

Perhaps I'll get better with more and more practice. I hope so, because when I speak a lot of Romanian, I find that my tongue actually gets tired by the end of the day and I really can't pronounce words correctly without taking a lot of time to slow my poor tongue down and give it the time it needs to complete its fancy tricks. I wonder if speaking in tongues ever includes the Holy Spirit making our tongues do things that we thought were physically, rather than liguistically, impossible.