Afraid of saying (or writing) something stupid

In my new position, I am in charge of giving the opening welcome and announcements. God help me, I'm afraid of saying something stupid when I do that.

Then again, it's already happened. Last Sunday, the senior pastor and I had worked out which announcement I would give and which one he would announce. Well, once I got up to the lectern at the first service (8 a.m.), I gave his announcement and then turned to him for the other one. Whoops. He let me do both announcements for the remaining two services.

In my previous appointment, I was less afraid because it was in my second language; mistakes were inevitable. I was going to say (and did say) something estúpido on a pretty regular basis. My congregation either laughed at it, because they had never heard something phrased that way before (they loved it when I used the word chismes, or gossip), or if it was really bad, they gently corrected me and taught me the correct way to say something. When speaking in your second language, you're going to say something stupid. This slows lots of folks down from speaking in the language that they're learning, which is unfortunate, because speaking it is part of how you learn it and making mistakes is part of how you learn in general.

Even when speaking in your native tongue, you'll also inevitably say something stupid. When I told my husband about this blog entry's topic, he said, "Being afraid of sounding stupid doesn't slow me down any. I do it all the time!" (And he said I could quote him.) When I write this blog, I want for what I write to not sound stupid. That's part of why I don't post any more than I do - what I do post, I've thought about for a few days to make sure it's post-worthy and not stupid. I know sometimes it'll be stupid anyway. That certainly happened a few times in my monthly newsletters I sent out when I served in Nicaragua.

And I suppose a stupid greeting is going to happen from time to time in church as well. They can't all be winners, right? It may just be a problem of practice - the more I give the greeting and the welcome, the more comfortable I'll be doing it and I'll find a "standard" way of doing it that suits me and doesn't sound stupid.