preacher girl...

well, today I took a HUGE step forward... I gave my first preach/talk!

I was so scared. We'd been told about a week and a half before that some of us were going to be doing one (10 of us in my week), and had to prepare it ourselves and everything! Hmm. I thought "ha, yeah right" straight away! Seriously considered telling Mary (the "evil" woman making us do it)where to 'stick it', but realised they'd probably heard all that before, and thus would not be bothered by it in the slightest.. and would still make me do it. So I sat down, ready to chat with God, read through Colossians (our talks had to be based on something from Colossians, and see what He wanted me to talk about.

Man oh man. God makes you wait doesn't He! After a few days of stressing and feeling like maybe God doesn't want me to do this (cos He knows how awful it would be), I finally got a clear conviction that I hneeded to talk about unity in the whole church body. Hmm. Nice one. Something that I was pretty sure old people were meant to preach on. Get in.

However, as I looked into the topic, and thought about how this had actually influenced me and my faith, it started to grow on me... a lot.
I thought about St. Aidan's (sorry "Middlesbrough Community Church") and how, in recent years, there had definitely been an increase in the stress on joining churches together and finding unity, with Christ at the head. Was still a right stress-head about it though. Even though there was only going to be 5 other people in the room and it was only for 10 minutes. Whatever. I've never done anything like this before, and I didn't like the idea of it one bit (obviously, so I'll try not to go on about it... :) ).

Today came anyway, and I was pretty nervous (UNDERSTATEMENT). I had to take the bus cause my bike's knacked up, the bus was late, then there was loads of traffic, then there was a diversion that I had to take when I got off the bus because of construction goin on along the river, and by the time I got there, the groups had already started! ARGH. Not a good start. However, I was put with the one and only Davey P-unit (legend), which was great, cos Mary's lovely (but pretty scary), and also with Ian, Tash, Abi Jonas and Janette. Lovely lovely.

I went third. Nicely in the middle (safe!). Anyway, my turn came and I found that it's actually not that bad! I could MAYBE say that I even enjoyed it! WHAT?! I pretty much scrapped my notes, and went almost 5 minutes over my time 'allowance', but everyone said they didn't want to stop me because they loved it! I had a lot of passion and brilliant deliverance apparently! Hahaha. As if.

Check me out. Or God - cos there was NO WAY I did that by myself!

:)