I need your help

In the future, you could develop a deathly fear of public speaking.

For this occasion, I’m thinking that you could Segway to talking about gospel attributes. How do you learn and live gospel attributes? Maybe you have some experiences from your own life that you can share.

Recently, I was in a church service where the pastor spoke on the story of Ruth. He talked about the loyalty that Ruth showed to Naomi when Ruth was alone and about to return to Bethlehem. In that day being without a husband, Son, or father to provide financially put you one step away from homelessness. Ruth went into a field to glean after the harvesters. As a foreign born woman alone, this would have been very dangerous for her. At best, it would be long and back-breaking work. At worst, she could be attacked.

Anyway, the pastor made the story about immigrants and refugees and homelessness and how we can show kindness and support and not heap sorrow upon them. We can donate or volunteer for programs that serve such marginalized individuals.

When we serve people who have no way to repay us that is called charity.

Charity is the pure love of Christ. It is the love that Christ has for the children of men and that the children of men should have for one another. It is the highest, noblest, and strongest kind of love and the most joyous to the soul (see 1 Nephi 11:23).

That is an example of how your talk could go. You could talk as long as you wanted about the story of Ruth, about refugees and the homeless, and about how you have learned and lived this gospel attribute of charity in your life.

A few Sundays ago, my wife and I were asked to give a talk in sacrament meeting about one of the sections in Come Follow Me. When I was preparing the talk, I also ran into the problem of figuring out what to talk about. I could’ve gone the route of just repeating the traditional dogma, but I wouldn’t have felt entirely honest.

I settled on finding a piece of the suggested material that I found agreeable and expounded on it as much as I could. In my case, I chose the section ‘The Lord is more powerful than any idol’, and made my talk about putting Christ above everything else in our lives. It was something that I could talk about pretty easily and openly without straying into uncomfortable areas. So I ended up doing what you had the idea of doing, just focusing on the Savior. Which IMO, is what most if not all talks should be doing anyway.

Thankfully though, something came up and we never had to give our talks.

Thank you so much for all of your comments and thoughts. There were many wonderful suggestions and things to think about. I’ve been working on my talk and I do have a personal experience that I can use. I also have a grandson currently serving a mission and his last letter told of some relevant experiences that I would feel comfortable sharing. There is a conference talk by Elder David Evans -10/2017 on the subject of truth. He talks about having had a lot of questions about the church in his youth growing up. He relates talking to his mother about these questions and she would say “that is a good question. While you are searching and reading and praying for the answer, why don’t you do the things you know you should do and not do the things you know you should not? ” I really like that.

I allow myself the freedom to draw on secular sources even when I’m told to use certain church-approved sources. As long as the secular sources are consistent with gospel principles, I never get hammered by the leadership for deviating from the church script.

On that note, you might draw on First Things First by Stephen Covey. He advocates the perspective of the week when planning work and priorities. Weaving in this approach, you could list the gospel principles you want to hone, and then have a weekly meeting with yourself to address which gospel principle you’ll work on that week.

This is similar to the Ben Franklin Approach to pursuing virtue. If you research that, you will see the list of things he was pursuing and could use that as an example.

You could comment on the need to be patient with oneself as renovating character can be a slow process fraught with setbacks. Perhaps look up a couple scriptures on patience and then apply them to living gospel principles.

That’s my two cents, and worth every penny.