The Stuttering Believer

⁴ Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. ⁵ God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. Ephesians 1:4-5

From as far back as I can remember I stuttered, pardon me, the politically correct way to say it is I have a speech disfluency, either way it’s been an interest idiosyncrasy that could only have come from a God with a rich sense of humour. One of my earliest nicknames in school was MC Stammer, I know I just dated myself…..Yes I’m a child of the 80’s, such a simpler time. As cruel a nickname as it was you have to admit that it was pretty clever. Moving from high school to university were defining years for this young stutterer, interestingly enough the nature of my disfluency evolved in much the same way that I did. Initially my disfluency took the form of “repetition”, which essentially meant repeating syllables and parts of words. Interestingly, by the end of high school me and a few friends had started a sound system and I was spending most of my time collecting records and honing my skills on the turntables. In hindsight I wonder if my repetition was some foreshadowing of a career as a party rocking DJ, cutting and scratching vocals on records . Like I said at the beginning of this post God has a sense of humour, incidentally so do I.

After University I entered the working world much to the delight of my mother who was by then distressed about her son’s musical aspirations. I have never been able to come off the hamster wheel since. It is what it is. Throughout my professional journey my speech impediment has robbed me of quite a few opportunities to progress along the natural career trajectory. Many in decision making positions interpreted my speech challenges to mean a lack of both competence and confidence. I guess it must be weird being in a job interview sounding like a machine gun when I try to talk. All jokes aside this has had a serious impact on the person I thought I was……..until I met Christ.

On September 10th 2023 yours truly became a part of the body of Christ, I accepted Him as my lord and saviour and got baptised soon after. As a new Christian with a child-like curiosity about God’s word, I stumbled up on this gem during Bible study, Genesis 1:27 reminded me that God made me in his own image, verse 31 says “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good….“. Sounds simple right? It actually is that simple. Think about it, If I am God’s creation, made in his own image, that means that I was created with some purpose in mind and I have inherent value and dignity. I strongly doubt that the 6 days of creation mentioned in the scripture were just some idle pursuit. Don’t believe me? Psalms 139:13-16 confirms this idea by stating “13 For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. 15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. 16 Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.“. Ephesians 2:10 says “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

Think about it like this, if you slaved away tirelessly to form a creation filled with your love wouldn’t you reserve the right to define what it is. Exactly! Only God has the right to define who we are and what our purpose is. So to the rest of creation I may be a stuttering mess but in God’s eyes I’m His. Guess whose opinion of me matters more? Even the great Moses, one of the most prominent figures in the Old Testament, expressed concern about his speaking abilities when God called him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Exodus 4:10-12 shows us “10 Moses said to the Lord, “Pardon your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since you have spoken to your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.”11 The Lord said to him, “Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord?12 Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” Ok, so If the great Moses who admittedly had speech issues of his own was such an important figure in scripture then why am I so fixated on my speech disfluency. All this means is I’m in great company, Moses stuttered along while freeing the Israelites from captivity so let me stutter along while God reveals his purpose for me.