I know many people have an aversion to speaking in front of a crowd, but none more than writers, I think. The whole reason we write in the first place is because we express our deepest thoughts best through the written word. We ponder over each word, we bleed onto the page, the letters have our own DNA.
Personally, I have a hard time finding the right word when I'm talking one-on-one to somebody. I pause, I stumble, I embarrass myself. It's that much harder when I speak in front of multiple people. Yet, I did it! Yesterday I gave a short message about discipleship at youth group. It couldn't have been longer than 10 minutes, but I was anxious about it all day. Thankfully, on the way to youth group, the tightness in my stomach left, and I was left with a confidence not in myself but in God's ability to take my delivery and speak to each student what they needed to hear. I still blanked out at one point and had to figure out what I was supposed to talk about next. I still had that compulsive nervous swallow in the middle of a couple sentences. Why does that happen anyway? I should look it up.
Anyway, I had a lot of people praying for me to get me over the hurdle of the first "public speech" since freshman year of college. I know I needed to hear what I talked about, so if nothing else, I learned a lot from doing this. I think I get to speak at youth group again in September. Here we go!
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