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Key Bible Verse: In your strength I can crush an army; with my God I can scale any wall (Psalm 18:29). Bonus Reading: Ezekiel 3:1–11

You know the distinctive, sonorous voice of James Earl Jones. When your windows rattle at the tag-line "This is CNN," it is his unmistakable voice making it happen. Or perhaps you know his deep voice as Darth Vader in the Star Wars movies, Mufasa in The Lion King, or Othello.

What you may not know is that he suffers from a speech problem that paralyzes some people. James Earl Jones is a stutterer.

As a teenager in Michigan, Jones's stutter was so bad that he hardly dared to speak. He was, as a result, incredibly shy and withdrawn. But once, for a school assignment, he wrote a poem that impressed his teacher. The teacher—perhaps suspecting that someone so shy and tongue-tied wasn't bright enough to write such a piece—decided he'd probably plagiarized it. So she challenged James to recite it from memory.

Although scared of speaking before the class, James thought it better to be laughed at for stuttering than to be disgraced. Amazingly, as he quoted from memory, his words were steady, smooth, and fluent. It was then he discovered that the scripted word came easily. A career path had opened for him.

—Rubel Shelly in Starting Today

My Response: A fear-based threshold that I need to step over is …

Thought to Apply: You've got to jump off cliffs and build your wings on the way down. —Ray Bradbury (science fiction writer)

Adapted from Starting Today (Broadman & Holman, 2001) by permission.

Prayer for the Week

Lord, I want my life to carry a bold witness for You and Your kingdom. Give me the courage to follow through.

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