The School Reports That Got It Wrong

What Moses, Dyslexia, and Unexpected Callings Have in Common

Sometimes our greatest strengths emerge from the very places where we once struggled most. Image: Canva Pro.

Welcome to today’s reflection.

Some people look back on school as the best years of their lives. For me, it was anything but.

Today, I reflect on how God sometimes takes what others perceive as weakness and turns it into a strength.

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I would not have been regarded as a successful school pupil.

At least, that was the conclusion most people reached.

Throughout my school years, I struggled with almost anything involving reading and writing. Words seemed to behave differently for me than they did for other children. I could read a paragraph, then find it had vanished from my memory moments later. Spelling tests were a disaster, and written assignments took me far longer than they appeared to take everyone else.

The reports that came home were often variations on the same theme: “Needs to try harder.” “Could do better if he applied himself.” “Further education may not be suitable.”

Looking back, I understand why those comments were written. Nobody was being cruel. The problem was that during my childhood, many schools simply did not recognise dyslexia in the way they do today. The assumption was that if a child struggled with reading and writing, they either lacked ability or lacked effort. The possibility that their brain might process information differently was rarely considered.

As a result, I spent much of my childhood believing I was failing at something everyone else found easy.

When I left school, I built a successful career in aviation. I learnt to work around my limitations. If a task involved reading, I would find another way. If something took me twice as long as it took everyone else, I simply accepted that I would have to work twice as hard. It was exhausting at times, but it worked.

Years later, something unexpected happened. With a lot of hard work, I completed not one but two degrees, and then trained to become a priest. Somewhere during that journey, I was formally diagnosed with profound dyslexia.

The diagnosis was a revelation for me. It was a relief to discover there was a reason things had always felt harder. It was not laziness. It was not a lack of intelligence.

My brain simply processed information differently.

What surprised me most, however, was what happened next. The thing I had spent much of my life seeing as a weakness slowly became one of my greatest strengths.

— • —

I discovered this most clearly during ministry. Reading publicly from the Bible was never easy. Words can appear differently to me. Sentences can shift around, and reading from a manuscript requires enormous concentration; otherwise, what would come out of my mouth would be very different from the text. Preaching from detailed notes was even harder. Most clergy can work from a carefully prepared script, but I found that almost impossible. If I looked down too often, I would lose my place. Words would come out differently.

As a result, I had to develop a different approach.

I learnt the passage. I lived within it. I walked around thinking about it, prayed through it, and carried it with me during the week until it became part of me. Rather than learning a sermon, I learnt the story. Rather than memorising sentences, I memorised the meaning.

Over time, I developed the ability to stand up and speak from the heart because I knew the passage so well that I no longer needed to read it. What began as a limitation became a strength, one that I refined over more than a decade and one that eventually led me somewhere I never expected to be: writing professionally.

If you had shown my school reports to my younger self and then told him that one day he would earn his living through writing, he would have laughed. Or perhaps cried. Quite possibly both.

— • —

Whenever I think about my journey, I find myself drawn to the story of Moses.

God calls Moses in a dramatic way from inside a burning bush.

His response? He immediately begins listing reasons why he is the wrong person. He questions his own worthiness, worries that people will not believe him, and doubts that anyone will listen. Then comes perhaps the most revealing objection of all. Moses tells God that he has never been eloquent.

He points directly to what he sees as his weakness. He is not a gifted speaker. He is not persuasive, and therefore, he is not the obvious choice. In other words, Moses does exactly what many of us do. He looks at his limitations and assumes they disqualify him.

God sees things differently.

The remarkable thing is that God does not spend much time arguing with Moses about his weakness. Instead, he reminds Moses that he will not be facing the task alone.

Moses focuses on what he lacks. God focuses on what he can become and who will be with him.

I suspect many of us spend our lives caught between those two perspectives. We become experts at noticing our deficiencies. We remember the subjects we failed, the opportunities we missed, the things we cannot do as well as other people, and the weaknesses we wish would disappear.

What we rarely consider is that some of those weaknesses may become the very places where our calling is formed.

— • —

I would never have chosen dyslexia. Given the option, I would gladly have accepted the ability to read effortlessly and remember most of what I encountered. Yet if I had been given that choice, I would never have developed the skills that dyslexia forced me to learn.

I might never have learnt how to absorb a biblical story so deeply that I could speak about it without notes. I might never have developed the discipline required to complete degrees despite the difficulties. I might never have become the writer I am today.

The weakness would have gone, but the gifts that emerged from wrestling with it might have gone as well.

Of course, that does not mean every struggle is good, nor does it mean every limitation has a hidden blessing waiting around the corner. Some difficulties remain painful, and some burdens never become strengths. But sometimes, when we look back over our lives, we discover that God has been working through the very things we wished he would remove.

Perhaps that is why I find so much comfort in the story of Moses.

God did not choose Moses because he was the obvious candidate. He chose him despite all the reasons Moses believed he should be ruled out.

I wonder how many of us carry around our own version of those school reports. Perhaps they do not exist on paper. Perhaps they are words spoken by a parent, a teacher, an employer, or even ourselves. Messages we have repeated so often that they feel like facts.

You are not clever enough.

You are not talented enough.

You are too old.

Too young.

Too broken.

Too ordinary.

Too late.

Yet the Bible is full of stories about people who believed those things about themselves, only to discover that God saw something different.

Perhaps the greatest mistake we make is assuming that our weaknesses tell us who we are.

Moses thought his lack of eloquence disqualified him. I thought dyslexia disqualified me. You may have your own reason for believing that God could never use you in a particular way.

But what if the thing you see as a limitation is not the end of the story?

What if it is the beginning?

The things we see as disqualifications may not be disqualifications at all.

They may simply be the place where God begins.

Thank you for reading today’s reflection.

Paul.