I am a writer with dyslexia.
Even typing those eight words feels like a paradox. It’s taken me years since the diagnosis to claim both titles — writer and dyslexic — without feeling a pressing need to spout off a list of achievements faster than the words “a writer with dyslexia” landed on a hearer.
I had hoped my accomplishments could outrun the words that sometimes elude me.
It was during my first year working as a digital managing editor at a publishing house, helping to shape the words of some of the most gifted writers, when I learned I had dyslexia. This reality stirred a well of insecurities, adding another layer of vulnerability to my already overflowing desire to prove that I was enough.
I often doubted how the very tool of words could, on the one hand, be instruments gifted by God to create sentences that sing of His grace and truth and yet, on the other hand, be the source of my greatest struggles. It’s a paradox that I still wrestle with. But it has become a sacred wrestling, one where my weakness collides with God’s immense strength. It’s in the quiet spaces between the stumbles with words that His truth whispers most profoundly. Here, in this very tension, lies an encounter, a holy ground where my limitations bow to God’s boundless power and glory.
For many of us, we have spent years seeing inadequacies and limitations as only weakness adjacent. And we’re not the first to know this struggle. During His day, Jesus’ disciples (despite witnessing His many miracles firsthand) didn’t always see how God’s power and glory could and would work through, not apart from, their imperfections and limitations.
In John 9:1-3, Jesus encounters a man who was born blind. His disciples asked Him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
Just as it was with Jesus’ disciples, this story of the blind man challenges our conventional understanding and approach to limitations. Jesus’ intention? That, through this encounter, we might gain better sight.
Take a brief moment to consider the areas where you are experiencing lack or limitation. Could it be that what you see as a perceived lack is leading you toward greater dependence on God? Is this lack or limitation posturing you to receive His provision and not your own?
There’s no denying that our limitations are hard, and our lack is inconvenient. Surely, this fallen world is not the way God originally intended it to be (Genesis 3:16-19). Still, He’s not left us without hope nor without the ability to still give Him glory.
But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
2 Corinthians 12:9
It’s now been four years of working in publishing, and I can bear witness to God’s grace being sufficient, as He uses my weaknesses to qualify His call on my life. I am a writer who wrestles with dyslexia but, more than anything, I am a child of God whose identity is found in Christ — the Word who became flesh.
Could it be that God permitted this paradoxical path for me that I may, all the more, embody the power of His grace? If so, it’s a paradox I am willing to live out until He heals me . . . or calls me home.
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