Torrential Rain, a Talk, and Iva's Pantoum

Torrential rain yesterday and a wonderfully stormy Channel.   Cathy rang up first thing to cancel our field service.  It was impossible.    She has kindly volunteered to be my helper for my upcoming talk, as my assigned helper is going to be on her holidays that week.

My subject is:  HOW CAN YOU FIND HAPPINESS?

And this is the material I have to cover (in the usual 5 minutes):


“Better is a dish of vegetables where there is love than a fattened bull where there is hatred.”
Proverbs 15:17
“I, Jehovah, am your God, the One teaching you to benefit yourself, the One guiding you in the way you should walk.”
Isaiah 48:17
“Happy are those conscious of their spiritual need, since the Kingdom of the heavens belongs to them.”
Matthew 5:3


We are in the second school, not on the main platform, and I am working on point of counsel no.27 in the Ministry School Handbook, which is:

Study 27
Extemporaneous Delivery
What do you need to do?
Speak in a manner that is characterized by spontaneous word choice as well as careful preparation of ideas.
Why is it important?
Extemporaneous delivery is the most effective way to hold the interest of and motivate an audience.

Important one for me to work on as I like to work from a word for word manuscript, and I am really going to try to do without one this time, just using the 3 Scriptures as my framework.  I need to talk it over with Cathy, but I think I want us to be two sisters, back from the field service, discussing a call we have just had with an angry householder.

It was sunny enough today for Captain Butterfly and Butterfly Mark to be out in the wilds of Sussex, with sandwiches.  They had a great day.  I can't think what I did. Watched quite a bit of daytime TV (guilt guilt), did some housework, two loads of washing and washed the floors, caught up with my studying for the meeting tomorrow, and did a little bit of witnessing on the internet.

Oh, and I found a poem I read once many many years ago - 30 years perhaps - and always hoped to find again. This is what the poet, Marilyn Hacker, has to say about it:

This is a pantoum, a poem which was meant to be memorized, a Malaysian form written in quatrains in which the second and fourth line of each stanza become repeated as the first and third of the one following until it ends up with its tail in its mouth like the worm aruburus. And this one I wrote for my daughter Iva when she was younger and it's called "Iva's Pantoum".

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/iva-s-pantoum/comments/