A Rambling Reminisce About Public Speaking (Pure Self Aggrandizement)

In college 45 years ago I enrolled in a public speaking class and my first assignment was to read a selection from Caesar’s Commentary On The Gallic Wars, a selection about how to capture sleeping elephants.

It went well.

When time came for my final exam speech, word got out and many students skipped other classes and gathered in the public speaking room to hear my talk. They filled every chair and stood lined up around the classroom walls; those who could not get into the room clustered in the courtyard outside and some actually hung through open windows to hear me speak on the topic Judgment Day And Telephone Calls.

Heady stuff.

Flattering.

Ego building.

Over the years I’ve been invited to speaking engagements many times. Once I was asked to conduct a funeral. Members of the extended family belonged to several widely divergent religious denominations and could not agree on which real preacher should be asked conduct the service; they compromised by asking me.

Why?

“John,” the caller said, “We know you go to church and all that, but you don’t seem very religious so we thought we’d ask you”.

What a nice compliment.

The deceased was quite elderly so for the eulogy I used a World Almanac to outline events which had happened during her lifetime: so many Presidents, first automobile, first electric lights, first bridge across the St; John’s river, etc.

For the religious portion of the funeral service, I just talked about Jesus, His Resurrection, and His love for us.

One odd thing: the funeral director, who did not know the deceased at all, broke down in tears and had to leave the gravesite. Either he was tender-hearted for all his clients, or something in the message touched a nerve.

I don’t really know.

For many years I taught Bible lessons at a dirt-floor mission for down and out street people. These folks had little interest in Bible, they’d heard it all. Many times. So, to capture their interest, I developed various gimmicks and show-and-tell displays to illustrate the lessons. Each talk was a one-off because seldom would the same person be at a lesson more than a time or two.

Once the pastor of a society church came to visit our home while I was preparing a gimmick for a talk at the mission; the visual intrigued him and he asked me to fill for him in teaching the adult Bible class at his church.

That ended up with my teaching the same lesson twice each week for about eight years, once to the guys at the mission and once to the people at the society church.

Regardless of social status, we all need the love of Christ equally so I taught the same lesson both places.

Not to name-drop, but people in the church class included a retired football player who wore his Superbowl Ring, several physicians, attorneys, architects, an art collector, an FBI agent, a socialite who started a home prayer meeting with her five maids, a judge, and other folks of that caliber.

Incidentally, I should mention that at this time I was earning my living as a janitor. When Jesus said that in following Him we might stand before kings, He did not mean we'd ever stand there as equals.

Here’s something odd:

I am known for my store of refined, tasteful jokes geared to the taste of refined, cultured people… but whenever I’d start to tell a joke, both the folks at the mission and the society church would groan before I even got started good.

Puzzling that.

One adjustment I made between the mission lessons and the church lessons was that for the church folks, I assigned homework.

Yes, I actually expect people in my classes to learn.

The novelty of doing Bible homework captured the fancy of the class. They had a blast. And once when one couple went to Paris for a second honeymoon, they made a trans-Atlantic phone call to get their homework assignment for the class they missed!

That blew my mind.

Yes, I always get a kick out of public speaking.

I hog the spotlight.

Puffs me up.

Another funny thing happened once at the church:

The area Bishop came for his annual visitation, a ceremony with all the pomp and circumstance of full processional with regalia and clouds of incense.

Before the scheduled super-service, the Bishop attended the Bible class. That morning the discussion grew lively and the class ran long.

I said, “I have one final point to make, but we’re out of time”.

The Bishop said, “No, I’m interested. Go ahead and finish the lesson. I’m pretty sure they won’t start the service without me”.

Broke me up.

One thing that troubles me about my speaking and teaching is that I tend to rely more on my gimmicks than I do on the Spirit of God. I tend to speak from natural ability rather than from God’s power.

Public speaking scares me terribly and I use those gimmicks as a crutch instead of relaxing and allowing God to control. In fact, for the most part I memorize my talks beforehand because I’m so afraid of screwing up in front of people.

My December 25^th blog posting last year (see archives) mentions the greatest honor I’ve ever been paid as a speaker.

Anyhow, yesterday I spent rehearsing my history lecture at Argyle. I practiced reading excerpts from sources. I cleaned the artifacts to display. I practiced burning tea bags for the pyrotechnic demonstration on the Great Fire Of Jacksonville. I shaved. I packed the briefcases to go. I reviewed internet sites to illustrate my talk on the library’s wall-sized giant computer screen.

Ginny took off work an hour early so we could be at the library early enough to set up the displays (We’d already made a practice run Sunday to locate the place, a 35-mile round trip).

The library advertised the event on line and on a theater-like moving marquee . They tacked up several of these neat posters to attract people:

Not one single person came.

Not one.

Oddly enough this came as no big surprise nor disappointment because from the initial invitation a couple of months ago and right up through all the preparations, both Ginny and I have felt a subtle check in our spirit about this event as though we knew it was not going to happen.

Nevertheless we prepared as though it would just in case it did.

Does that make sense?

We’d have saved a lot of energy if we’d paid more attention to that feeling which may, or may not, have been generated by the Spirit.

But the time was not wasted. Ginny and I enjoyed a delightful chat with Ms B., the head librarian. We discussed the future of printed books in a computer oriented society, and the challenges she meets as head of a library in a booming population center.

Afterwards Ginny and I drove to an IHOP restaurant for supper. We lounged in a window booth watching a lightening storm. We sipped delicious coffee and talked for an hour or two. We’ve more or less decided that health, energy and time constraints indicate that we should forgo extra activities like this history talk in the future.

Thus endeth my speaking career in a blaze of mediocrity.

When we came out of the restaurant, two frisky stray cats scampered around on top of our car batting the radio antenna and we laughed at their antics.

Then we drove home to watch videos we’d checked out of the library.

It was a beautiful evening.