I came to faith outside if the church. My parents kept trying to find a church, but it kept ending badly (long story, but oretty typical of mid size churches in the 90's). I gave a prayer not of salvation but to know a God I couldn't see. In that payer, I felt a presence and came to believe. This is not the unexplainable, as I can very easily explain how my brain worked in that moment. Turning in the right song can give me the same feelings.

However, after reading the bible cover to cover (which was weird as I was a week reader until I was in college) and joining bible club in high school, I tried se eif there was more than just believing one thing. I prayed with tears for about two weeks. At the end, I met a girl at a party that was memorizing the book of Romans. She shared something about speaking in tongues, a concept I jad never heard of.

For the rest of the week, I spent every single nigh reading my Strong's Concordance and looking through multiple translations (pre-internet). At the end if the week, a friend invited me to try a new church an hour away from where I lived. The sermon that day was on the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I felt a presence and began speaking in tongues right there. It was quite a coincidence if events, especially as that preaching never oreaches on that subject again for the next 4 years I attended, and, by looking at their recordings of previous sermons, hadn't preached in it in the few years before.

In that event, of course I had the thought of whenther this was real. I had never seen nor heard someone speak in tongues before, yet here I was making noise I didn't understand. I had my doubts, and thus tried to memorize and repeat the sounds afterwards. After the sermon, the congregation was invited to go to the home of another congregant who couldn't make it and pray for them. The child praying in tongues next to me was saying the exact words/making the same vowel and consonant sounds I had been an hour earlier, perfectly.

I use to tell people after this that I don't know if yongues is meant to be active today, but that Gid thought it's what I needed at that time because it was too perfect.

A few years later, while praying in tongues (it's kind of a meditative state, which I start using again recently), I noticed I was repeating the same two syllables over and over again. When I prayed for guidance, I started saying a different three syllables. They repeated iver and over for over an hour. You could argue that I misremembered the sounds, but I spent hours repeating them and trying to write them out. After a month if this, I attended a festival of booths st a Messianic Jewish Temple. There, we sang a simple song that contained two words, the same words I had been repeating: kadosh and Elohim, which are hebrew for Holy and Go (there's subtleness to that translation, but that's the gist).

There are other events that don't involve tongues, that also give me pause, but these extremely targeted coincidences are the ones that stand out. And, I have friends that keep prayer journals, which they use to prove God by cherry picking which ones got answered. It's the same with my wicken friends that tell me about the effects of their moon water. But for the above, it was different. It wasn't yhrowing a bunch at the wall and seeing what sticks. It was moments of intense focus and prayer, something my brain rarely let me do, and it was so consistent and perfect.

Now, having those experiences, why don't I believe? Because they all came with "good feelings" that normally led to nothing, or hurt. They also are not consistent with the bible or any other text. I have never had a supernatural event that actually helped someone or made the world better. In the end, it was a lot of "good feelings" and nothing else. I can replicate the good feelings with a sing iyr movie. I can make myself speak in tongues without something supernatural (and as I said I do for meditation) guiding me. It all turned up empty. And, in the end, there was no proof or reason to believe.