My first Sacrament meeting talk!

January 16, 2018

I spoke in sacrament meeting this week! Woohoo! I was asked to talk about things I remember about President Monson, who passed away last week. Man, there was so much you could say. I didn't realize until I started looking back just how much I learned from him. When he first became prophet, I felt like he just told stories and didn't ever teach anything. I'm smarter now - I realize how much I learned from him through his stories, as well as through his catchy quotes. Keeping with his style, I talked about 3 things.

1. Never let a problem to be solve be more important than a person to be loved.
2. Read the Book of Mormon every day.
3. Go and find someone who is having a hard time and do something for them. - his birthday wish.

I didn't say much about each thing, it took a long time to figure out how to just explain each point and share a bit about why I chose it. My whole talk was 2 pages, large type. I was pretty worried about being really short and leaving the last speaker with gobs of time...but fortunately, the last speaker was someone who can pretty much do anything, so I knew things would be fine. Still, it's not so nice to leave the last person with half an hour to talk, right?

I didn't need to worry. I talk a lot more slowly in ASL, and I took 20 minutes. The branch president was about to kick me to get me to sit down. 

The stake president was visiting our branch - he called a new branch clerk - so we had translation again. It's so hard to just tune out and keep talking.I did better than last time, but there was one part that they just translated wrong, and I stopped and tried to figure out how to sign it better. I just couldn't figure it out. Finally, the translator got what I meant to say, and we moved on. 

I wasn't sure how to write my talk down, but I ended up writing it gloss-style, pretty much word-for-word. For example, "President Monson, he himself teach me lots."

The best part of the talk was when people laughed at the humorous part! I told about how I didn't understand much when we first came to the branch, but every week I would have a moment of clarity when I could understand and learn from Sacrament meeting, and what a blessing that was to me. And now it was their turn to experience that, because even if they can't understand everything I sigh, they can learn through the holy ghost, too! :)