Digging at the guts

Ok, that title might have been a little too visceral, but sorry ... that's the way I think.

I'm trying to dig apart 31 Psalms for the study I'm beginning at the Pour Out a Blessing blog. It's exciting to me. This stuff makes me a little high. But, I want to beat myself for some of my early choices - ok, my educational choices. And then, I want to stand in front of high school seniors and college freshmen and tell them that they had better not DARE allow themselves to be driven by their fears and expectations of failure.

There was one thing I was good at when I left high school - music. So, it seemed that the best option for my future was to teach music. Actually, I was going to be a music therapist. I think I also believed that I would quickly be married and would end up in a small town in Iowa, working in a local nursing home and raising a family.

Uhhh ... do you see any of that in my life?

I made those decisions because I was not challenged to make different decisions. I don't know why my parents didn't push me into something bigger. I suspect a lot of it was driven by financial concerns, some of it was the fact that mom wanted me to stay within the state of Iowa, and much of it was that they allowed me to make decisions for myself. But, those decisions were made by a girl who attended a small high school in a small town and who had seen very little of the big life out there.

Today, I wish that I had gone to seminary and had been forced to learn Hebrew and Greek. I would like to have that information parked in the back of my head so that as I tear through these Psalms and as I write Bible studies and teach, I would have that information available to me without having to rely on extraneous sources.

I know, I know. It's never too late to learn. And I'm working on it. But, it would certainly be nice to have it already finished and have had 25 years of practice in place so that these things would be familiar and easy to me.

Oh well ... I just wrote a study from Psalm 33:11. Yes, the Lord's plans stand forever. I'll count on that now...