Tonight's the Night

I guess I can't help myself -- lately I'm all about the the suggestive blog titles for posts that are ultimately completely innocent.

Tonight's the night we all give the 10-minute talks we've prapared for the public speaking class I'm taking. I've mostly just gone over it in my head, and I always go over time, but that could be because I get distracted and sidetracked by my own mental meanderings. When I ran through it for my roommate last night, he timed me and I did it in seven minutes. Woo! Of course, I was talking kind of fast, and he said he missed some of what I said because he wanted to pause and think about the last thing I'd said. That's a good sign -- I must have said one or two things worth thinking about, then. I just need to pace it a bit slower instead of trying to squeeze things into a short span of time.

I don't plan on using notes, which wasn't my original intention. But I wasn't sure what to put in those notes, and I might feel pressure to cover everything. I have a few points in my head, and those are memorized, so I'm going to go noteless. That may sounds reckless, but I'm not a reckless person and I'm actually confident about my decision. I've also spent the last two weeks preparing, so it's not like I'm winging it. I have something to say, lessons I've learned by living through them, and I'm OK with each run-through being different.

I was already starting to plan what I wanted to talk about when we were given choices of topics. Fortunately, one of the topic choices was kind of related to what I'd been thinking about, so I made the twain meet. My talk will be called "God Cares about Your Work," a title we were assigned. (The other choices were Psalm 23 or something to do with your job or whatever situation you need public speaking skills for, but my job has nothing to do with public speaking and I was already preoccupied with the idea of careers and dreams, so "Work" it was.)

Because it seems a little mean to tell you about my talk without telling you anything about my talk, here's a skeletal synopsis of my points:

* I've had to let go of the dreams I'd had since I was a girl, and several years later am still in process in the career department.
* For me, work and dreams are inseparable, even when they're miles apart in my day-to-day life. According to Psalm 37:4, God cares about the desires of our hearts. (The verse itself says, "Delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart.")
* There's substantial biblical precedent for long periods of waiting between having a dream or getting a promise from God, and actually seeing it fulfilled. That waiting is part of the growth process that comes with being human, and though it feels like a detour or even a complete derailment, it's actually getting us where we want to go.
* We can be overwhelmed with questions and uncertainty and fear of making mistakes. But I'm learning that mistakes aren't an unfortunate byproduct of this process; they are the process. God isn't teaching me not to make mistakes, but how to make them.
* I used to torture myself by obsessing over all my questions (e.g. "Are all the things lacking in my life the result of things that are lacking in me?"), because I thought grappling with the questions would get me answers. It's hard to get through a workday this way. Eventually I realized it wasn't getting me those answers, and that I was just torturing myself. It was simply unhelpful, so I gave myself permission to stop. It took practice to stop that circular negative thinking, but, interestingly, torturing myself less has led to my feeling less tortured.
* Looking back over the last 8 1/2 years, I can see purpose in what God has been up to. Having music out of the way has made room for God to dig up dreams I'd shoved aside and forgotten when I made the decision at age 12 to pursue music professionally. And that rediscovery process has been fun. It's like getting a dream upgrade. I'm excited about my future, and that wasn't the case for a long time. I'm getting glimpses of what might be in store for me, and as I allow myself to be jazzed about those possibilities, I find I'm delighting in the God who's making it happen. Hey, was I just finding God delightful? Isn't that what the Bible verse talks about? In the greater context of the Psalm, I think God is basically encouraging us to hang in there with Him, so we can be around as He proves Himself faithful. And I'm looking forward to watching how He does it.

OK, that's not so skeletal.

But hopefully it'll take less than ten minutes. I'd hate to be a diva ;-).