Despite our new advertizing tool, we had about the same number of people show up to English this week. We think it's because the weather is so nice that no one wants to sit around inside anymore. They've got better things to do. However, our core students from last class all showed up, so at least that made us feel like we're good teachers.
This week I got to give a talk in church and of course I forgot about it until saturday night, so my performance on monday was a full wing. I got some scriptures that I could use and I found a cool talk on the subject. But it was in english. So I decided I would look it up in Romanian when we got to church and then use that. However, that talk of course wasn't translated in Romanian, but I liked it so much that I decided I would just translate it myself as I was reading it. The member who gave a talk before was supposed to take 20 minutes for her talk and then I would take 20 as well, but then she ended up wrapping up 10 minutes early, so I was blessed with another 10 minutes of speaking time. I've never given a full 30 minute talk before, but you know, I figured I could do it. I prayed for help and after that I was feeling pretty confident. So I get up and just go for it. I had no problems until I started reading from the talk in English. I learned pretty quick that translating in real time into a foreign language is pretty tough. But I made it through that and continued giving the talk. I got into that flow zone where you don't even hear yourself talking or think about what your saying it's more of just your brain talking for you. I think the translating sapped my powers because once I got to about 25 minutes in I realized I just couldn't even understand what I was saying. Once I realized that, my mind just shut down and I kind of stuttered to a halt. But I was able to recover with a great scripture coupled with a metaphor and dismounted gracefully with a testimony and stuck the landing. After the fact, I had the greatest post-talk relief wave of my life. I wasn't really nervous to begin with and my audience wasn't huge, but the relief was great all the same. I realized then that that was the longest talk I had ever given, regardless of language. And I didn't prepare it hardly at all. I was pretty proud of myself after that because there was NO WAY I would have been able to do that before the mission. Even in English. My prepared talks usually crapped out at around 3-6 minutes. Now I'm cruising with the 30 minute foreign language fully winged talk. And it felt pretty great. God was definitely with me, there's no way I could have made it otherwise. So the moral of the story: don't be forgetful.
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