Speak To Me

So, I had to give a talk in church today.  I don't know why, but the way the councilor in the bishopric asked me really bothered me.  It was my first FHE in my new ward and the instant he heard I was new to the ward, he said "how 'bout you give a talk on the 26th?"  My records hadn't even been transferred yet!  There was more to it than that, but yeah... not important.  Of course, I still agreed to talk.  

The nice thing though was that my topic was "any conference talk."  So it was kind of cool because I had a few weeks to think, "what do I want to talk about?"  I ended up choosing Elder Wirthlin's talk "Come What May and Love It" from October 2008 General Conference.  I love that talk and he has some great points and funny stories.  A few years back, one of my religion classes at BYU was "Sharing the Gospel" and he spent a good solid week of classes on how to give the best talks.  He said to just have bullet points - main ones, and "if I have time" ones, so that way if you only had a small amount of time you were good, and if you had extra time, you had extra things to talk about to fill up the time.  Before that, I used to always write my talks word-for-word and honestly, they were probably quite a bit more boring.  But the last talk I gave (just two months ago) I finally got to apply that principle and it worked great.  So this one, I did the same thing.  It apparently worked well again, because people I didn't even know came up to me afterwards and said "great job on your talk today!  It was so good!"  I didn't think it was anything 'spectacular' but everyone seemed to love it, so that's good.  I guess it might have something to do with the fact that I'm not afraid of speaking in front of large crowds.  My roommate even commented, "you looked really comfortable up there."  Yay for no fear of public speaking! :P

Wirthlin's 4 Points were:

1. Learn to Laugh

2. Seek for the Eternal

3. The Principle of Compensation

4. Trust in the Father and His Son

To read his full talk, go here.  It's great.