I taught Gospel Doctrine for the first time today. I felt really nervous. Really nervous! But only before the lesson and the first few minutes and then I relaxed.
Sara sent me this text after church:
“ I wanted to come talk to you right after class, but…. Sunmi. Anyway, you were so great today Jenny. It was a wonderful lesson and I love the way you teach so much! And you looked so beautiful today.”
(I am so lucky to have a friend like her!!)
When I told her how nervous I felt beforehand she texted:
“ You never seem nervous. You always seem like you were just born to be teaching the particular topic you are teaching. And I don’t mean any disrespect to any of the other Sunday school teachers, because I think they are all great…. But I just feel like you have a gift of including and capturing your entire audience more than any other teacher I’ve ever had. And you are so inviting. You radiate such positivity and love.”
Most of the time teaching or speaking at church feels pretty easy because I am teaching people that I know and genuinely do love. I don’t know that I would be a good public speaker for strangers …but that’s why I stopped being nervous today…because I looked around and remembered that I was just talking with friends. That no one was there hoping I would fail and that we were all just there to learn from each other about this gospel we love. I wished we could just pull our chairs in a circle and just talk about Moses and Abraham and share our testimonies and experiences.
In testimony meeting I loved one thing that Richard Bennett said. He talked about the moment before the miracle and how there’s a time of discouragement and doubt or despair or heartbreak or confusion and that his 2021 was a lot of that moment. But that the miracle does come! I think we will see a lot of that this year in the OT…both the moment before the miracle and the miracle!
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