DILBERT
CREATOR GETS VOICE BACK

Topics: Adversity; Body; Crisis; Disease; Healing; Health; Illness; Miracles; Overcoming; Power; Struggles; Testing

References: Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 103:3; 145:8–9; Isaiah 64:3; Romans 10:8–13; James 1:2–4

Scott Adams, the creator and writer of the Dilbert cartoons, suffered from a vocal disorder—spasmodic dysphonia. With this rare disorder, a certain section of the brain simply shuts down, paralyzing the ability to speak with much command or volume. Think of it as a more permanent case of laryngitis.

Oddly enough, the condition is situational. For example, Adams could speak quite well when using his public speaking voice, but his more conversational, everyday voice eluded him.

Adams wrote on his personal website about how frustrating the condition was. He desperately wanted his normal voice back. One day he finally had a breakthrough. While helping his child with a simple homework assignment, Scott found that he could speak perfectly when using a rhyme scheme. He could say, “Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick” with very little difficulty. As he noted on his website, it was “just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.”

What is amazing is that Adams’s regular voice returned as well. He likened the healing to starting up a car on a cold winter night—the words of the poem awakened a sleeping section of his brain, and his normal voice suddenly emerged.

In a similar way, the living Word can awaken and transform a heart that has been spiritually dysfunctional.

—Brian Lowery, “Dilbert Creator Healed of Mysterious Illness”; source: “Good News Day,” dilbertblog.typepad.com (October 24, 2006)