My Story – Christine

 

 

Then I said, ‘What hurts me most is this- That God is no longer powerful.’ (v.10) You are the God who performs miracles. (v.14)  Psalm 77

 

 

Thirty years ago, scared and hesitant, I went to talk with the minister of my Church about my stammer. I wasn’t used to talking about it. In fact, I would much rather not even think about it, but after a short period off work with anxiety, it seemed obvious God was prompting me to find a new path with these issues. I was so ashamed that I struggled for two hours (no exaggeration) to tell him what I had come for. The minister listened patiently, spoke broadly about Christian healing and asked if I thought God might want to heal me like that. I gave way to my honest response:

 

“What?” I said with a sceptical tone, “You mean miraculously?”

 

I wanted to believe there could be a spectacular end to my story, one that would make me feel special and loved. At the same time, I knew I could not accept that anything supernatural could happen and, as that was the only way I could imagine my stammer might go away, everything seemed hopeless. I also knew, from long experience, that no amount of learning to live happily with my stammer would ever satisfy my longing to experience myself as whole. I wanted the minister to convince me that supernatural things could happen. He surprised me by not even trying to do so.

 

“Well,” he answered, gentle and wise, “You see, I wouldn’t use that word [miraculous]. But you can, if you like.”

 

I left his house that day with something more precious than a belief in supernatural events. I had glimpsed the truth that God might want to heal me, and that it might not be necessary for me to do impossible mental gymnastics in order to hope for that. After all, the sunrise is a miracle and that happens every day.

 

After daring to ask for a miracle, I was to wait some 15 years before I first began to experience my speech as fluent. During that time, I reflected a lot about my childhood, joined a speech therapy group for a time, attended counselling regularly for a year, became interested in Transactional Analysis and began to use its models of human experience and communication to understand more about my stammer and how my internal experience worked. I enlisted the support of my husband, my friends and my colleagues with some of the little experiments I wanted to carry out with new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. We moved to another part of the country. There, having left behind an experience of being deeply understood by the minister at home, I had an experience of being painfully misunderstood by the minister of my new Church. In that refiner’s fire, God taught me still more about himself, my stammer, myself, other people, relationships, communication, faithfulness and the way to wholeness. We moved to Suffolk.

 

One day, in the fifteenth year, as I prayed alone at home, God drew very close to me.

 

“Lord, thank you for everything you have taught me over the years. I feel now as if I understand what my stammer is and how it works. All the pieces of the puzzle fit together. I can see my problem so clearly. But, Lord, I’m still stuck in my problem and I feel I cannot get out. Please show me: what do I have to do to be free?”

 

I thought that God was saying, gently, that he wasn’t going to tell me the answer, because it was better for me to see it for myself. I thought I saw Jesus gesturing as if to encourage me to look again at my problem. So I looked again and saw myself stuck in a problem. I waited and looked, and, as I did so, something quite remarkable happened: I began to identify with the part of me that was looking at myself being stuck, instead of with the part of me that was being watched. I understood that that part of me was not stuck in the problem; that, in that part of myself, I was free.

 

The realisation ripped over me, and through me, like a tidal wave. I struggled to align this new truth with the other precepts I had based my life on. From this new vantage point, I did not know where I was. It felt as if the very foundations of my frame of reference were suddenly whisked away from under my feet. I had thought all my life that everything was like that, but it wasn’t like that at all; no, it was like this...But, no, it wasn’t like that either...What on earth was everything like? Who was I? And how on earth would I live in this other place?

 

A few days later, I went for a walk in Christchurch Park to try to get a break from my disorientation by choosing to look outwards into the world, instead of withdrawing into myself so intensely. As I walked, I had a remarkable experience of heightened awareness. The blue of the sky and the green of the grass were very bold, and the sounds of the barking dog and the laughing children were crystal clear. I felt a strong tension in my diaphragm and ribs. I chose to let it happen. By the time I reached the shops, the tension was fading, but my ribs hurt after the exertion.

 

I realised I felt hungry and I went into Marks and Spencer’s to buy a sandwich. As I took it through the check-out, I spoke to the cashier. And I was absolutely astonished at what my speech sounded like and felt like. It was whole. It felt right. I saw my own puzzled expression reflected back to me in the face of the cashier. I realised how stunned I must look. “Are you okay?” she said. I spoke again, tentatively, as if to make sure of it: “Yes,” I said. Still clear, resonant, no struggle. “Thank you. Yes, I think I am.” But I still took my change and my sandwich and headed for the door pretty quickly, before there were any more strange goings-on! By the time I reached the top of the park again, I was singing praise to God.

 

That was 14 years ago. It feels like it was yesterday and my praise response is still new every morning. Since then, I have run some workshops for adults who stammer and I have written an article about stammering for an international journal to try to share some of things I discovered along the way. I also spent more time with a skilled psychotherapist learning to associate pleasure with my voice.

 

At one time, you would not have persuaded me to stand anywhere near a microphone. These days, sometimes, when it is my turn to read the lesson at St Matthew’s, and I experience my voice, amplified, filling that big high space and echoing all around, I think it is one of the most wonderful experiences anybody can have on earth.

 

Healed? Definitely! Miracle? Yes, a thousand times over! Supernatural? I don’t know and I don’t think it matters. Fantasy? No way!

 

A humanist or atheist might hear my story and say that it’s all very well, but it wasn’t really God that healed me; no, it was a counsellor, a therapist, a psychological theory, a meditation experience, a creative use of the imagination, together with some common sense, my own determination and intelligence and the result of a human being interacting with their environment. A Christian hears it and sees either God breaking through in supernatural power in a remarkable way, or God ever active in his creation, drawing people closer to him, healing our brokenness; or both. Whatever it was, I am certain it was not magic or fantasy. What changed me happened here and now, in the real world, not far away in some imaginary never-never land of daydreams.

 

Because my story is rooted in the real world, I think my praise is stronger, my faith more resilient, my celebration more joyful and my service more committed than it would have been if I had managed to believe in the fairy tale that, in the beginning, was the only way I imagined I could be set free. A fairy tale is not sustainable. Reality is, because God sustains it.

 

Do I believe, now, that God works sometimes through supernatural events? Yes, because if he can do such a very wonderful thing in my life while I am buying a sandwich in the high street, he can do anything, for anybody, anytime, anywhere, anyhow.

 

But, we can get very bogged down on whether something was ‘supernatural’ or not. Those arguments can distract us from what really matters: God is moving, not far off, but among us, here and now, very close. He does it every day in many, many different ways, meeting each one of us where we are. We risk missing him if we confuse miracle with magic and fairy tales; if we only believe God is involved when he proves it by doing something so extraordinary that there could be no other explanation; if we fail to acknowledge God working in ordinary ways every day – just as much as we risk missing him if we do not acknowledge that God is God and does extraordinary things.

 

I want to tell the atheist and the humanist that, without God, there is no story. God made the counsellor and the therapist, gave birth to the psychological theory and guided its use, gave us the ability to meditate and to use our imagination creatively, and the ability to direct our common sense, intelligence and determination towards growth. He placed us in our environment. He gave us science and medicine and he wants us to use them to build his kingdom.

 

So mostly, this story is about God. It is about God meeting with a person. In order to meet him, he does not demand that we elevate ourselves to heaven, trying to work out what the formula is that will make us worthy to meet him and be changed. No, he comes to us, just as we are, here and now, in our real world. And when his divinity meets our humanity, you can feel so grounded on earth, in your own skin, that you see and hear the sights and sounds of heaven all around you, in the colour of the sky, the rustle of the leaves, the warmth of the sun, in the lives of the people you meet, and you experience a taste of heaven in your own heart and mind and body. The ordinary becomes miraculous for you. You don’t have to make believe any more. And things are never the same again.”

 

 

“From the unseeable, legends leap. In the rock of our days is hidden the print of miracle.”

Ruth Bidgood.