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.

Robin appeared before applauding crowds, wearing a fur coat worthy of any actress. She waved at fans, who gawked at her incredibly long nails and big brown eyes. But she had grown accustomed to such attention, starring in the movie Hotel New Hampshire and appearing regularly in the Circus Vargas. She was a 250-pound bear and the prized possession of her trainer, Wally Nagtine. He had raised Robin from a cub. However, he warned, you can’t make a bear do anything it would rather not. Threats of retaliation were useless in training the bear; instead, Wally used rewards like honey and words of praise when she did well. She lived with people and existed peacefully with Wally, who controlled her ferocity, but she was not domesticated, for all that. Without constant restraint, she would quickly revert to her natural self.

Conversion gives us what the trainer gave his bear: control and direction. We might say it spiritually domesticates us—it makes us something altogether different. Yet this also is true: If we slip the leash from our conversion, we will rush right back to being a wild, rebellious sinner, hating grace and living unworthy of divine companionship. Only as we allow conversion to keep applying its grip on us will we be fit to serve God. Only as the Holy Spirit leads us do we find ourselves less like the sinners we naturally are and more like the saints he is pleased to make us.