my first talk

Yo dudes, from sunny Miamaaayyyyy!

Just wanted to tell you how Saturday went. As I mentioned last time I was giving the talk to the Jóvenes Plus group, my first ever 'talk', as in doing the sermon bit, except less like a sermon more like a talk because it's just to a small group as opposed to a Sunday congregation.

It was on the transformation we have in Jesus.
[The verses for anyone who's interested: Mark 2:17, John 9:39, Galatians 5:1, Matthew 8:1-17.]
The writing of the talk wasn't as hard as I thought it could have been, the Lord gave me the verses really clearly, and from that I was praying about the message that they gave together - ie. what God wanted to say through them.

I had been planning to give it in Spanish, and had written all my notes in Spanish etc. But then on the day I was going over it with Ary, and because my notes weren't a word for word speech but more just like leading sentences, I was having real difficulty being precise with the blurb I was saying in between. To the point that I started crying because I just hadn't been prepared for how... incorrect I was being with my Spanish. I don't think I was very mentally prepared for the Spanish being such a barrier, still. So we decided really easily to just do it in English and have Danny or Ary translate it as I went, which we did.

When the time came to give it (praise God that people were there, unlike the time before!) I started feeling really out of it, and like I had no words or train of thought or anything. So I kind of just opened my mouth with something, anything... But then ended up feeling stupid, something about having someone translate everything you say pressures you to say something really valuable, worth translating! So I ended up feeling like I couldn't be my bantery self, plus the practicality of translating half sentence by half sentence just totally killed whatever flow I had expected to have. I think it was just a real attack to be honest, I felt so out of it, like I wasn't really there, with no sense of time or the point of what I saying. I couldn't remember what I had said already, or what I still needed to say, and I couldn't tell what the important bits were or if they were going in.

So needless to say by the end I felt pretty awful.

But thankfully from what I've heard since it didn't come across that way. Phew or what?! Apparently it actually made sense and flowed well. So thank God for that.

Also, miraculously, don't have any fear (despite everything) at the concept of doing it again. Just looking forward to the day that I can do so in Spanish.

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