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For years and years I’ve had a fear of public speaking. This goes from speaking up in class to leading a group, or anything in front of church. Anyone who was at my baptism, saw me say my testimony and heard more than 2 words of it clearly was very lucky indeed – I reckon I broke a words per minute world record that day!

And I’ve always assumed that was it.

But this weekend, I realised that’s not what my fear is!

On Sunday I was welcomed into membership at my church (which is great!!) but, when I was up the front, all I had to say was “I do” and even that bit was fine, but standing there, in front of everyone, was just horrible!

I don’t mean that in a nasty way. Having the whole congregation there promising to support us too was wonderful. But just in front of that many pairs of eyes, well, the pinchmarks on my hands spoke for themselves!

It seems my fear is more to do with being the centre of attention. Leading a meeting, up the front of church, these things all involve the whole room looking at you, and that’s not fun at all!

Do you have any fears that are not what they seem?

Sometimes I just don’t think we’re grateful.

I was brought up to say please and thank you at all times, which I like to think I’m pretty good at, but this doesn’t mean I’m always grateful.

I’m probably least grateful every morning when my alarm clock works and wakes me up. In fact, that normally makes me grumpy and/or angry!

This whole idea of how ungrateful we can be really struck me a couple of weeks back, just after the bank holiday. We all had an extra day off and all we did on the Tuesday morning was complain about needing longer – I’m pretty sure that’s the jist of every conversation I had that day! Don’t get me wrong, we did say it was nice to have the day off, but I don’t think we were entirely grateful!

I’m good at moaning, and sometimes I think that might be the opposite :S

I often wonder what my favourite age was, and I guess there’s many ways to measure this, but here’s one.

The first birthday I truly dreaded was my 20th. After being a teenager for so long, changing the first digit of my age felt like so much more of a step and suddenly so much more grown up and responsible when I was still just a student – I didn’t look forward to it one bit! So I guess I often think of 19 as my favourite age, that was 2nd year of Uni, which was when I really started to enjoy it (apart from the studying of course!). I took massive steps forward that year, learnt a lot, am a better person for it!