So Sunday night at youth group it was my turn to give the message (us three interns took turns) and were doing a video message series and then discussion groups and what not. Anyways, so my video was called Today (out of the Nooma series) and it was about how so often we hold on to things of the past and never let go and move forward with life. And I’m really the queen of holding on to the past, I don’t normally hold grudges, but I remember the past like it was a cute little puppy, even though quite often, it’s an ugly horrible part of my life that I’m holding on to like I would a teddy bear. Let me give you an example, most of you know I was adopted right? So one of the bigger memories I have of before I was adopted was sitting under the kitchen table while my parents screamed profanities at each other and i watched my mom be violently abused by my father. I will never forget a certain vision of my dad slapping my mom across the face. It is a vivid memory. The fact that it is a memory is okay, but the fact that still to this day, I want to beat the living daylights out of my dad for doing that to my family is not. So the message was about giving the stuff we hold on to, to God, and letting him take care of it.
This message completely hit home for me because I am so guilty of it. If someone could take apart my brain or heart and look inside, they would see about 100 hurtful things living in there, still haunting me. But God desires to take those off our shoulders. He desires to make us new again and let us move on from those things. He desires for me to move on from that awful memory, and the many other things that hold me captive. Our God is so good. Why would he want to take a memory like that off my shoulders and put it on His? Occasionally I question why He would even do that, but then I realize his incredible love for us. I can’t even dream of doing that for someone to show them I love them. But Jesus did that for us, and I don’t think I could ever fully fathom the depth of his love.
Through this message all I could think about was how horrible of a speaker I am, Speaking was not one of God’s gifts to me. I get nervous, and then it all goes downhill from there. So the whole time I’m speaking this message or praying or whatever, I’m thinking about how awful I speak, and how self-conscious I am about speaking, but we did this activity in the end, that hit home so hard I almost started crying in front of the entire youth group. We took a note-card, and wrote down what we were giving to God and releasing from us so that we could live in today and not in the past, and then we took our cards and burned them as a symbol of giving them to God and letting them fall to ashes for us. I wrote on my card “bad relationships.” It was all I needed to write because those two words covered just about every hurt that I had. I then had to share what I wrote on my card for the youth group to kinda give an example as what to write, I shared something small, not quite as heavy as what I just shared here, and burned my card. It was everything I had to hold back tears. But as I look back, tears wanted to flow, and I’m not quite sure why I stopped them. Tears to me show heart and emotion, and I think at that moment, the audience wouldn’t have minded. However, that self-conscious guard said woahhh! No crying! I finished that message barely touching the surface of how I really felt about the subject, leaving me wishing I spoke more from the heart and less out of my fear of speaking.
So my advice is this, if you are speaking on something that really hits home with you, speak from your heart. Don’t let the fear of failing mess with your head and not let you go as deep as you want with something. It’s worth it, because what audience doesn’t love a genuine real person?
What do you all think?
Ashleigh
