History Hurts my Brain!

I'm pretty sure that the official panic has yet to begin, but I had a momentary glimpse of it today. I try to spend these days here at the cabin being productive and will generally knock out a week's worth of either the God in History blog or the Pour Out a Blessing blog during a day long session.

The God in History blog takes a lot of effort on my part because I don't feel that I have a good strong foundation in history. In fact, I've discovered that I base a lot of my timeline information of history on what I know regarding Biblical history.

I'm reading Steven Pressfield's book, "The Gates of Fire" about the battle of Thermopylae. The Persian king that fought 300 Spartans was King Xerxes. Well, it was his father, Darius that after subduing Nebuchadnezzar, allowed the Christians to return to Jerusalem and provided them funds to rebuild the temple. There is every probability that Xerxes was the king in Esther's story. As soon as I made that connection, I was able to place the book into a timeline I was comfortable with.

When I consider the vast amount of information that I have yet to learn regarding history, I am grateful that I have thousands of years of biblical history to work with. That remains my anchor.

But, once the Bible is finished and I have to face history without it as an anchor, I find that I must do a lot of reading and researching so that I can ensure my writing is done so within a context that I comprehend. It took me several hours of reading this morning to get a basic understanding of the time period surrounding the Crusades. And that was just a BASIC understanding.

As I sit here 5 hours later, my brain is totally fried and I feel as if I need a nap.

This is where the panic begins to set in. How in the world am I going to face down all of the work I'm going to have to do, the reading I'm going to have to absorb, the papers I'm going to have to write? It won't be just one course at a time, I will be in the middle of several courses. I do remember what college was like and my much younger, more agile brain was in a world of hurt on a regular basis as it tried to keep things together.

I'll set the panic aside. This is exactly what I'm looking forward to doing. But every once in awhile I reserve the right to throw a panic tantrum.