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As a youth-focused lecturer, I work on making my talks more of a conversation with audience participation. Early this spring I was giving a talk to a Christian Science organization at a college campus on the East Coast, and the natural interaction that flowed from that hour was really special. The students felt totally comfortable stopping me at various points and asking questions.
Prior to the talk, I’d been praying about truly speaking from the heart and letting God unfold the direction of this lecture, while allowing the ideas and conversation to flow naturally, as opposed to just forcing my way down a prepared outline. Each question that came up, and there were lots, took our conversation in a slightly new direction at first, but it was cool to see how naturally we flowed back, each time, to the main thread of the lecture. It was a wonderfully rich experience.