The Jobs I Did Not Apply For

He rehearses the first sentence before he rings anybody, and he has been doing it so long that he no longer notices it as rehearsing.

Not the whole call. The first eight words, and specifically the first sound, because he knows which ones are difficult and there is a whole map of the alphabet in his head that nobody else has ever seen.

He swaps words. That is the skill, and it is a considerable one. Mid-sentence, at speed, he can reach for a different word that means nearly the same thing and lands on an easier consonant, and he does it about forty times a day, and the person he is talking to has no idea it is happening. They think he pauses a bit. They think he is thoughtful.

He has swapped his own surname twice, at a counter, for a longer explanation that avoided saying it.

And then there is the larger version of the same thing, which he has never once described out loud.

There was a job three years ago. Good job, right level, everything he wanted. It involved presenting, weekly, to a room. He read the description twice and closed the tab and never mentioned it to anybody, and if you asked him now why he did not apply he would give you a reason about the commute that he half believes.

That is the fourth time. Fifteen years, four jobs, and one reason he has never said.

That is you, and the swapping is not the thing that has cost you the most.

Two things I will hold to

The first. If you have never been to a speech and language therapist, or if it has been years, go. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Exodus 4:11-12, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

This is not medical advice and I have no idea what would help you specifically. But there are people whose whole profession is this, and the work they do is real, and going to them is not a failure of faith and never has been. There is no version of trusting God in Scripture that requires somebody to stay unhelped.

The second. I am not going to promise you fluency.

Not here, not in a song, not in a declaration. Nobody writing to a stranger can promise a mouth. God may do exactly what you are asking. He may do something else, or something partial, or something you did not think to ask for, and that decision is His and it will never be a report on you. Scripture holds that ground in Exodus 4:11-12, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Between those two there is a great deal of room, and everything else here happens inside it.

You are welcome to bring this to God exactly as it is. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth, Psalm 145:18, and in truth is the operative phrase for a man who has spent fifteen years swapping words, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody stop editing for a minute.

God does not accept the reason

There is an exchange in Exodus where a man tells God he cannot speak, and God's answer is one of the strangest and most useful things in the book.

Moses has said he is not eloquent, that he is slow of speech and of a slow tongue. He is not being falsely modest; whatever it was, it was real, and he raises it twice.

And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.Exodus 4:11-12

Two things, and hold them together, because separately they both get misused.

The first is that God does not dispute the difficulty. He never says Moses is imagining it or that it will vanish. The impediment is treated as real throughout, and it is worth noting that Moses still has it at the end of the chapter; God's solution is to send Aaron with him, not to change his tongue.

The second is that God will not accept it as a disqualification. Now therefore go. Not once you are fluent. Go, with the mouth you have, and I will be with it.

You are not disqualified by this from anything God actually gives you. Scripture says now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, Exodus 4:12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes with a mouth rather than waiting for it to improve.

The editing is the cost

Here is the thing that has taken more from you than the stammer has, and it is not the swapping.

The swapping is a skill. It is fast, it is invisible, and it has got you through fifteen years of a world that is not built for you.

The editing is the other thing. Four jobs. The presentation you got somebody else to do. The question at the meeting you did not ask and then heard somebody else ask badly forty minutes later. The fact that you order the second thing on the menu rather than the one you want, which is so small and so constant that you would not think to mention it.

None of those was a decision about your speech. Every one of them was presented to you, by your own mind, as a decision about something else, and the reason given was always plausible, and that is how fifteen years of a life gets quietly edited without anybody noticing, including you.

You are not less capable than the man who got that job. Scripture says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit does not assess a person on the fluency of their first eight words.

And nobody is asking you to be fine about it

I want to be careful here, because there is a kind of encouragement that ends up asking a person to be grateful for the hard thing.

You do not have to be grateful for it. You are allowed to want it to be different, plainly and specifically, and to ask God for that in the same terms you would use for anything else.

In the Gospels a man is told by an entire road to be quiet and shouts louder, and when Jesus asks him what he wants he does not say whatever you think best. He says he wants to see. Nobody corrects him. Scripture records the question and the plain answer with no rebuke attached, Mark 10:51, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a man asking for his own mouth.

Ask for it. And then go anyway, with the mouth you have, because those are not in competition and Exodus 4 puts them in the same paragraph.