A Tale of A Sunday Talk

On Saturday afternoon, April 17th, I noticed that there was a message on the phone from Thursday night for Caleb from Bishop Longhurst. I had Caleb call him back, and we found out that Caleb was supposed to give a talk in church . . . the next day. The subject was his choice of a favorite talk from the Priesthood session of General Conference. Saturday evening I decided that we needed to get to work on the talk. Mark had mentioned that Caleb had seemed to like the talk President Uchtdorf gave, so we printed that one out.

Now came the hard part. Have you ever tried to get Caleb to sit still and do something?? It is not an easy task. He likes to be up and moving. When you do get him to sit down, he immediately goes into "I'm too tired to work on anything right now" mode and threatens to fall asleep. He also didn't like any of my ideas of how to organize his talk, but he didn't have any ideas of his own. Let it suffice to say that we got nowhere with the talk preparation.

On Sunday morning I had to go to an early morning choir practice, so it fell to Mark to help Caleb with his talk. As I was leaving I  heard Mark giving Caleb suggestion after suggestion only to have Caleb veto every idea.

As I sat in the pews after choir, I had to wonder if Caleb was going to have a talk prepared or not. There was also some question about whether he would make it to church on time to give said talk, as he has struggled a bit in that area of late. Megan was there with me, and she assured me that Caleb and Mark were right behind her, but . . . church started and no Caleb.

As the opening hymn began, I was hoping it would be a long one to give Caleb time to get in. My worst fear was that he wouldn't get in before the Sacrament and he would be locked out and have to walk up to the podium as they were announcing him as the speaker. Still, that would be better than not having him show up at all.  Oh no - the opening hymn was short.

Just as we finished the last verse, Caleb came in looking like a deer in the headlights. He took his place on the stand, and Mark sat by us. I gave Mark a searching look, but he just shook his head. Oh my.

Caleb got up to give his talk - and he did a fantastic job. He had some notes, but he actually gave the impression that he had his talk somewhat memorized. Afterwards several people from the ward came up and congratulated him or passed on congratulations through me.

If they only knew . . .