“I sought the Lord, and he answered me; He delivered me from all my fears. (Psalm 34:4.)
When I prepare to write a devotional, I usually seek inspiration from a particular Biblical passage or theme. I am incredibly grateful to the Lord for his faithfulness in giving me the words to write on this little corner of the internet for over three years. My prayer is that those words have brought hope and encouragement, and perhaps ministered to someone at just the time they needed to hear them. Yet this week as I write, I feel strongly that the Lord wants me to depart from my usual methods, and rather than giving biblical teaching, to share some things from my own personal testimony. I have an intense feeling that this message is meant for someone specific, so if that is you, I pray the Lord will use it to encourage you, and to achieve what he desires.
When I was eleven, I had to go to a boarding school for the blind. In those days integration wasn’t as widespread as it is now, and my parents’ felt my best chance for a good education lay in my attending this particular school that was nearly two hours away from our home. Having grown up in an extremely close-knit family, to tell you I struggled would be a massive understatement. I lived for Fridays when my mother would come and fetch me, and dreaded Sundays when I would have to return to the school. I don’t know how I would have managed during those three and a half years if I hadn’t known the Lord.
Every night I would pray, begging Jesus to enable my mother to come and fetch me at the set time, and every Friday when I came out of school, she was there waiting for me. I used to practically run out of my final class, longing to hear her voice greeting me at the school’s main entrance. However, this couldn’t go on. It was taking its toll on both me and my parents, and they knew another solution had to be found.
With integration becoming more widespread, they made the choice to bring me back home to attend a regular school, and the day when I left my former place of education behind was one of the happiest of my life. Yet my experiences had left me with scars. I had always been afraid of being ill while I was away from home because I had seen how unfeeling our housemother had been to my roommate when she was sick during the night. So I fought with everything in me not to get ill, and I didn’t.
Six months after I returned home, just when everything seemed to be fitting into place, I started suffering from panic attacks, all based around a fear that I might be sick. This went on for months. At first I was given a number of medical tests, just to rule out physical causes, but it soon became obvious my issue was psychological. Next, I was taken to a child psychologist, and she was brilliant. She tried to teach me coping strategies and was very kind and compassionate, but still the panic attacks persisted. I couldn’t go to bed without having one. Nights became times of fear and dread for me, and of frustration for my parents. I also started having the panic attacks at school, and it felt like my whole life was being ruined by them.
One night, my mother rather tentatively asked if I’d thought to pray about my problem. I knew Jesus. I’d known him since I was a child, but up until that point my prayers had been rather general and not truly heartfelt, apart from the ones I’d uttered at boarding school begging for the safe arrival of my mother. Since my fear was specifically a fear of vomiting, I asked my mother if it would be okay to ask the Lord to make sure I didn’t, and she said yes. So I prayed, and slowly but surely, my nights became more restful, and the panic attacks faded into the background. I had sought the Lord, and he heard me.
Thinking I had now experienced my share of mental health struggles, I left school and eventually decided to work toward a degree in theology. This was in 2001, when technology hadn’t come as far as it has today. There was no kindle. Access to books was limited to what I could get in braille or on audio, and there certainly weren’t any theology books available in either format. So in order to draft an essay, I had to first scan my own reading material, then edit out the errors, then finally read and study. As you might imagine, after a few months of doing this, I was exhausted, and my old friend fear and panic reared its ugly head again.
This time the attacks were different. I knew I had to give up my course because I couldn’t keep up with the work, and I felt like a failure. I had been so sure this was what I was meant to do – so certain this was part of god’s plan. I began questioning my ability to hear from him correctly, and I felt like everything was crumbling around me. I remember sitting in the back of our church during a prayer meeting sobbing my heart out in the arms of the woman who would later become my mother-in-law. I hid myself away because I didn’t want people knowing what was going on.
Then one night, I did something totally out of character. I have never done anything like this before or since, and I’m certainly not advocating it. I am just a firm believer that if Jesus tells us to do something, we are wise to obey.
I was again at a prayer meeting. This time I was sitting in the first row of chairs, staring in despair at the gold curtain that draped the front of our little church. I felt bleak and useless, and I questioned whether God had any good plans for my life. It was as if the demons of hell were bombarding me with their negative lies, and the internal voices were getting louder and louder. Part of me wanted to run out of there and never come back, yet somewhere inside I heard a still small voice saying, “cry out to me!” I argued that I don’t do that sort of thing. I am an introvert. I struggle to show emotion at the best of times, let alone the worst. What would people think? Yet I felt something pushing me up out of my seat, and before I knew it, I was standing at the front of that church literally yelling something like, “Jesus, help me! I can’t do this anymore!” I can’t remember my exact words, but they were something along those lines.
I don’t remember what happened next, except for the church members being comforting and loving. Part of me felt ashamed for my outburst, yet another part felt it had been an act of obedience. It was all I knew how to do. I was drowning, and if Jesus didn’t rescue me soon I wasn’t sure what would happen.
A strange thing had happened to me around this time. I have always sung since I was a child, but I found I couldn’t. it was as though someone had taken my voice away. I could still talk normally, but when I tried to sing, only a tiny little squeak came out. So I couldn’t even praise Jesus as I was used to doing. All joy seemed to have been stripped away.
When I arrived back home after my cry for help, I knew I had to pick up God’s Word. Yet I didn’t know what I should read. My braille Bible was in several volumes, so I reached for a volume of Psalms. It was the first of three, and somehow, I turned to psalm 40.
“I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear the Lord and put their trust in him.” (Psalm 40: 1-3.)
As I read on to the end of the psalm, I knew this was god’s direct answer to my cry for help. I was especially touched by the reference to him putting a new song in my mouth, and I knew with certainty that from that time on I would be able to sing again. Later in the Psalm, David talks about how he has spoken of the Lord’s faithfulness, and how he has not concealed God’s love and faithfulness from the great assembly. (Psalm 40: 10.) At the time, I was preaching and teaching at our church, so again, I could relate to these words.
As I got to the final verse, my heart was overwhelmed. “But as for me, I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me. You are my help and my deliverer; you are my God, do not delay.” (Psalm 40: 17.) it was almost an echo of the cry for help I had uttered at the prayer meeting, and I knew my cry had been heard.
I have written all this to encourage you to cry out to Jesus. That cry may take different forms for different people. He’s not going to ask everyone to do what I did, and he likely will never ask me to do it again. Yet he hears even the silent cry of our hearts. If you are struggling as I struggled, don’t listen to those negative voices of doubt or fear. Listen to that still small voice reminding you of where your help comes from. Psalm 121 reminds us that our help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. Pick up your Bible and read the whole of psalm 40 and hear Jesus speaking words of love and healing to you. He has no favourites. WE are all equally special in his eyes. Cry out to him, and feel his loving arms enfolding you, assuring you that you are still his child. Let him comfort, heal, and put you back in your right mind. His love is eternal, and he is just waiting to help you. Oh, and if he asks you to do something out of the ordinary, then my advice would be to throw caution to the wind and do it.