Saturday, March 31, 2012

75 Children or 30 Adults


About two weeks ago I got to have a nice long talk with my pastor over coffee about me seeing God leading me in a direction other than Fort Lewis College for right now. During the talk I shared with him parts of my testimony and how it fit into God's plan for me. After sharing this he replied by asking if I would share this on a Sunday in front of the church. Of course I said yes because I love being challenged and I was totally okay with speaking in front of tons of people. In the past I have always been great at speeches and whatnot so this didn't seem to task me much beyond the usual book report at school used to. As the days before my scheduled speech slowly counted down I started to fear failure. This is rare for me because usually I am great at speeches. In high school I got one of the highest grades in my speech class and I never prepared for the class once. I have this great ability to bull-crap my way through public speaking, but for once I was honestly nervous. This time it actually mattered.

What if I tell my story wrong? What if I get up there and just simply can't talk? What if? What if??.... These questions kept swirling in my mind like the USS Enterprise caught in a cosmic dust storm. The worst part was that I couldn't even pinpoint the source of these doubts. I had been fine at speeches before, so why now am I nervous as all heck? I eventually came to realize that the stakes were infinitely higher this time around and that is why I couldn't help but freak out a tiny bit. Who knows if my testimony could help change someone in the audience's life? Let's suffice it to say that this realization only messed with my mind more. However, eventually I came to the conclusion that the whole moral of my testimony was that God needs to be in complete control of my life. If I can truly accept this then this speech will be no problem. It is not me that is speaking about my life, but rather me following a calling to let God's power move me to share of all that he has done, is doing, and will do in my life.

So with renewed courage I decided to type out my testimony tonight so I can be prepared to not screw it up tomorrow. I will most likely post it on here as well but I will need to clean up the written copy a bit first as it currently looks like it was typed by a toddler. Oh and the title to this post is in reference to Sheldon Cooper's theory on how many people it takes to trample a public speaker to death. Two thumbs up if you got the reference without my explanation. 

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