Yak, yak, yak......

This week I took my two older children to a speech conference led by 13 interns from an organization called Communicators for Christ. CFC was founded 11 years ago by David and Teresa Moon and they travel the country for 18 weeks every year with 13 CFC alumni who have been trained in speech and debate. Now, the statistics show that this is a very unique group of students, in more ways than one. If stats are correct than between 95 and 98% of the population in America has public speaking as their #1 fear -- their #2 fear is death. This means that the overwhelming majority of the people in our country would rather DIE than stand in front of an audience to speak. This is really sad to me, because we know from history that orators are the ones who emerge as leaders of a country.

Patrick Henry, Martin Luther King Jr., Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson....these men all emerged as leaders in their time. Today, truly effective orators are fewer and farther between. In our homeschooling community we have people like Doug Phillips, Jeff Myers, and the Moon family. Then,of course you have evangelists like Billy Graham and his son Franklin. Throughout the years, too, we have seen the rise of evil, such as Adolf Hitler. Much of the reason he was able to accomplish his goals had to do with his charisma and ability to command an audience.

Communicating is so important and we all do it every day, whether we mean to or not. As believers in Christ we are given the charge to be His ambassodors. Since we know that we are sons and daughters of the Living God, we have an obligation to be the best at communicating. After all, we are the ones with the Truth. The Moon family calls our obligation the "privilige of the platform." And it truly is a privilige. Yet it is also our obligation. We must share our faith with others and we must be able to communicate what we believe effectively. This is imperative to the spread of the gospel of Christ. God doesn't need us, He could make the rocks cry out, yet for whatever reason, He has chosen to use us to spread His Kingdom here on earth. As my husband and I train future leaders, the single thing we can do to best help them along is to train them to be able to communicate clearly and without shame the Truth that we as Christians know and believe with all of our hearts.