The Girl Who Couldn't Say Her R's

When Amanda Gorman was a child in Los Angeles, she could barely get through a sentence. A speech impediment made the letter R nearly impossible — words like "poetry" and "rise" tangled on her tongue. She avoided speaking in class. She practiced alone in her room, reading aloud for hours, her mouth stumbling over syllables that other children spoke effortlessly.

On January 20, 2021, that same young woman stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol at twenty-two years old — the youngest inaugural poet in American history — and spoke words that made a nation weep. "We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West," she declared, her voice clear and steady, carrying across the National Mall.

Nobody handed Amanda a script that morning. The words were already in her. They had been forming since childhood, shaped by every stumble, every hour of solitary practice, every moment she refused to let her limitations write her future.

When the Lord called Jeremiah, the young prophet protested: "I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth." But the Almighty was not asking Jeremiah to manufacture eloquence from nothing. He was revealing what He had already placed within him. "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you," God declared, then touched Jeremiah's mouth: "I have put my words in your mouth."

Your inadequacy is never the final word. The God who calls you has already equipped the very mouth that stammers.