I had been dreading this talk since I saw it come up as my first speaking assignment on the High Council. I knew that I needed to at least give it a good try and doing it in Spanish, but my Spanish has never been very good and I haven't really used it since the year after I got home from my mission. However, I committed myself to doing it in Spanish and then had to go through with it.
Luckily, these days I can dump my English talk into Google Translate and get Spanish on the other side. It's not very good Spanish, but it's better than what I would come up with on my own. I then used a number of long quotations from the New Testament that I could copy from the Spanish scriptures. Finally, I asked a mission companion of mine from Puerto Rico to edit my talk.
I should have gone through the talk verbally a few times before Sunday. I had meant to, but I just didn't make the time. I got tripped up on the pronunciation a bunch of times, plus I was very nervous. The congregation did appreciate my Spanglish jokes at the beginning, although the first one caught them a little off guard; it's not every Sunday that the High Council speaker says they hope they don't get pregnant.The Merrimack ward also feeds into the Spanish group, and it was their ward conference yesterday. So 60-70% of the group seemed to be absent, so I was really only speaking to a few families. That helped a little with my nerves. At the end, I asked the presiding bishopric counselor if I should just not bother with the Spanish next time, but he said I did fine.
So I guess I have until December to get better.
