I saw a bumper sticker once which said something along the lines, “Do not annoy dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.” I tend to look at audiences as being dragons and myself as something crunchy. I think like this even if the audience is only one person that I’ve known for years. I am simply not particularly comfortable initiating contact with anyone. I am mostly convinced that if someone is not currently engaged in a conversation with me, then they probably have no interest in starting one. Being an author I naturally have to spend a lot of time alone and in isolation, and so it strikes no one as peculiar that the only time I ever talk with anyone outside my immediate family is occasionally on Sundays at church. So far this month my cellphone tells me I’ve spent exactly zero minutes talking to anyone on the phone; I’ve sent and received only 12 text messages–all in response to my children needing something. And this is normal for me.

Most people, in my experience, are not saddled with such an odd perspective on human interaction as me. It’s a wonder I function in public at all, actually.

Getting to where I could passably survive public speaking has been an enormous mountain for me to climb. I’m really lousy at interacting with people, very shy, with appallingly bad self-esteem bordering on clinical depression (I’m actually on antidepressants now–for the last year–prescribed by my physician; I still don’t think people want to talk to me, but at least I no longer say mean things to myself constantly. The pills have helped a lot. Really).

Thus, I am absolutely not a naturally effective speaker. But over the years, I’ve been forced by circumstances to compensate for this lack. While I was still in college, someone in the church I was then attending asked me to fill in “for only two weeks” as the children’s Sunday School teacher. I agreed to it only because the person couldn’t find anyone else to fill in and I was the last hope. Then, after the two weeks had passed, my “filling in” continued without break for the next three years. The person I was subbing for never returned to her teaching position.

Then, after those three years, when I was by then in my graduate program at UCLA, someone asked me to “fill in” for the adult Sunday School teacher. I should have known better. Many years passed with me teaching that class. Then I wound up teaching college classes, too, since what else could I do with a degree in ancient Semitic languages such as Hebrew, Ugaritic and Akkadian?

When my wife and I moved to a new community, I somehow got dragged into teaching another adult Sunday School class–they found out I had both an advanced degree in biblically related matters and that I had actually been a college professor teaching Bible and Theology and Hebrew. Not so long after that, I started getting called upon to fill in for the pastor when he was out of town or ill. Then I got volunteered to preach now and again in other churches and even to give seminars. Thankfully the preaching gigs have really only ever been “filling in.” Nothing has ever lasted longer than two weeks.

But I get called upon to preach somewhat regularly.

And thus it is, for the second year in a row, I find myself facing the prospect of preaching the Palm Sunday service. Since I’ve now been doing public speaking for awhile (more than thirty years), I am able to do it without shaking and I almost enjoy it–sort of like you can get to where you almost enjoy visiting your doctor or dentist. God has a sense of humor; he took the last person in the world that anyone would ever expect to do public speaking, and someone who under no circumstances ever wanted to find himself having to speak in public–and turned him into a public speaker.

If you keep doing a good job, it only encourages people to keep coming back to you for more. Bill Cosby suggested that if a husband wanted to avoid having to do the laundry or the dishes, all he needed to do was mess up the task badly enough that the wife would decide to do it herself instead, to insure that the job got done right. My wife never bought into that notion, perhaps because she’d seen Bill Cosby’s routine and so she was prepared. Turning her clothes pink on more than one occasion only encouraged her to go shopping for new clothes: counter productive, it was.

If I purposely blew a speaking engagement and started babbling like an idiot, I might not ever have to speak again. However, public humiliation, despite it’s potential payoff, is simply not worth it in the final analysis. I’ve found it is better to just do the job right and suffer the likelihood of forever getting asked to speak again, rather than having people point and laugh at me for the rest of my life. I don’t need my nightmares to become real.

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