The Lord is My Shepherd Psalms 1-2; 8; 19-33; 40, 46

I have really been loving the Old Testament this year, and thanks to Come Follow Me, I feel like I have gotten more out of it than ever!  But I also have to admit my excitement for study waned a little this week as we headed into Psalms. I have really not been looking forward to it at all, if I'm being honest.

I really love podcasts and how they help me with my studies every week, and last week I got an idea from one of them that I decided to try, and it helped immensely. More about that in a minute.

But first I want to talk about TRUST.

Every week as I study the Come Follow Me lesson, there is always one theme that seems to stick out to me more than others.  This week it was all about trust. I don't believe in coincidences, so I know that it was not a coincidence that this message stuck out to me this week.

Right now I am in the process of making a personal decision in my life that is requiring a whole lot of trust in the Lord.  I hate to admit that I am hesitating.  Even now, I have made the decision, but actually committing to action is a whole other story.  Trust has a lot of enemies, and I have apparently invited them in to stay a while.

Fear is holding me back

I, by nature, am not a fan of the unknown.  Some people embrace it and jump right in.  The talk by Elder Bednar about faith and how you have to take those steps out into the darkness before the light will come is always in the back of my mind.  I know if I would just trust the Lord and take those steps, He will carry me. 

But just because He'll be there doesn't mean things will go exactly as I hope they will.  I learned that lesson last week from Job.

Sorrow is there too.

I thought the path I was on was the right one, and I thought I could do it all.  Turns out I can't.  With a million balls in the air, I am needing to let go of some of them, and it's hard to do when you love them all. So even if the path forward will bring joy, there is also a lot of sadness to leave other things behind.

And then there's anxiety

This one is probably the doozy of them all.  It's coupled with fear, but also with self doubt.  "What if" I'm making a mistake..."what if" what I want to have happen doesn't work out..."what if" I end up regretting my decisions later?

This is where trust comes in.

And I can talk a good game about how much I trust the Lord.  But when it's time for action, I pull back.

One of the things I have been thinking about a lot as we've been going through the Old Testament is that we hear an awful lot about the people that turn away from the Lord, then calamity happens.  But what about the people that don't.

There had to be a lot of righteous Israelites mixed in, sadly paying the price for the sins of the others as they all fall into captivity.  We hear some of their stories too, but what about the ones that didn't do anything big, they just lived quietly in righteousness?

That's who I thought about this week.  The psalmists, that quietly worshipped the Lord, that trusted Him even when times were terrible, and that sang these songs to Him. We don't even know their names, for the most part.

But knowing they were there makes me feel a little better as the world around me becomes more and more corrupt.  I need to constantly be thinking about that word TRUST, and follow Him who knows the end from the beginning.

And it's time for me to take action and leave a job I love behind.  I will be back in my shop and writing more blog posts as soon as I do, because this is the path I want to take. I am trusting the Lord to help me as I wade through these difficult waters.

A New Way to Study

Last week as I was listening to the Follow Him podcast, which I generally do every week, they were talking about other versions of the scriptures and how sometimes it helps to read a different translation, just to maybe provide a little clarity to what you're reading, or maybe give a little bit of insight that you might be missing.

One of the things mentioned was the fact that what we're reading in these Chapters is poetry.  But it isn't written like poetry, so it's hard to read it that way.  I found that interesting.  So, I know that the King James Version is our official Bible, and it is the one we study from regularly, and the one we teach from, but I wondered if I might benefit from a different version, even if the only difference is that it's printed like poetry. So I took the leap and bought one. I got the Tyndale Inspire Bible

I am SO HAPPY I got this Bible! 

The verses are written like poetry.

The verses are written the way we speak today.

And here is my FAVORITE thing about this Bible