Perfect Love Casts Out Fear - The Speaker's Trick
But Moses said to the Lord, ‘O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.’ Exodus 4:10
I feel for Moses here. I am eloquent enough for purpose with paper and pen (or screen and keyboard these days). But on the fly? Not so much. I have just started making reels. So there is evidence to that fact on my Instagram account.
There are exceptions to my stuttering and forgetting common words. I remember a conversation I had with a young woman who gave us our tour at the Dingle Distillery. It was her first tour on her new job, and she confessed her anxieties about public speaking. I reminded her that on one portion of the tour, she was indeed eloquent. It was the part where she told the story of the founding of the distillery. She loved that story. She was passionate about it. (I invite you to the Dingle Peninsula to hear it yourself.)
I said that when she was telling us that story, it was the story she cared about. She was not thinking about her performance. She wanted us to share her enthusiasm about that marvelous event.
That is the key. I called it the public speaker’s trick. To care about something, someone else. To care about the message. As the writer of the epistles of John said:
Perfect love casts out fear.
And now I remember that I was eloquent enough at my readings of Prozac Monologues. When somebody asked me a question, often with great concern for a loved one with mental illness or for themself, my heart went out to them. I wasn’t thinking about me. And I didn’t stutter.
My tour for A Gritty Little Tourist Town is about to begin. I need to remember that speaker’s trick, if I would call “love” a “trick”.
I notice that God promised Aaron could do the talking for Moses. But Aaron doesn’t. When the time came to speak for the people he loved, Moses was eloquent enough.
How do you approach public speaking?
This photo by jan_krutisch is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.