Today, I wanted to post photos from our trip to Atlanta, including some fab pics of the boys doing some Wii dancing, but there was a priority today: I had to write a church service.
One of my responsibilities at the newspaper are the church notices and I saw that the River Philip Pastoral Charge was struggling to keep the pulpit supplied, not simply by a minister but by anyone. So, because I wrote for the United Church Observer for ten years and am now a local columnist, I offered my services as a speaker.
What I forgot was that in rural areas, there isn't the crew to support a guest speaker; if you're providing the message, you're picking the hymns and writing all the prayers, too.
Yikes. But I took the challenge anyway because I know how to do this, as rusty as I am, and it's part of the plan. The platform plan. I have things to say, more than can be contained on a blog or on Facebook. It's a sense that's been gurgling around in me for the past few months, since "platform" became a necessity, an obsession, a frantic attempt to create a broader world for my writing and those things that want to be spoken out loud.
It's also a personal growth experience: Verily I say unto you, I suck at speaking extemporaneously. My mother nearly drove off the road from laughing so hard at my account of my last attempt to do so (ever supportive she is). I spent this morning writing my message then I practiced speaking it. I so badly wanted to ditch the notes, just use a guide so that I could be free to speak to the congregation, not read to them. My natural inclination is to walk, to gesture. But in public speaking, I'm not merely rusty, I'm seized up; getting a chance to speak at a small country church is my way of lubricating those hardened skills, of relearning something that I am not particularly good at to begin with.
(There is a great bit in Susan Cain's book on introverts about this, how some introverts simply don't have the ability to speak without notes, without reading. It was liberating; I'm not the only one.)
The good news (no pun intended) is that there is some genetic material to tap into here. As students, both of my parents won awards for their public speaking -- my mother for speaking extemporaneously about magazines; and I have my father's trophy, should take it with me for inspiration -- and three of my great-grandfathers were, according to my mother, great orators. One was a Baptist minister. They were dudes who knew who to talk.
Every great orator must start somewhere so on Sunday morning when I stand up in that small country church way the hell out in Millvale, I shall channel my inner Rev. Mode. With notes.