"But I don't want to!"

So, I am in a women's Bible study. We do "Precept Upon Precept" studies, which are in-depth studies of the books of the Bible, requiring homework for 5 days each week and discussions every week at our meetings. Tonight is my Bible study night, and I have done none of my homework for the week. Yep, I've been really bad.

I am having trouble with this particular study. It is on the book of Leviticus. Now, if you're not familiar with it, let me just say that you could call it God's Book of Rules for Israel (well we know the whole Bible is that, but I'm making a point here). It's full of "You shouldn't eat animals if their hooves aren't split, nor if they don't eat grass" and how the priests will diagnose someone with leprosy (not just leprosy the disease, but the Hebrew word used also means any skin disease) and what they have to do to be clean again, etc. Put blankly, it can be a pretty dry read.

I am actually learning a lot from this study, even though I have a bad attitude. It's pretty amazing how these rules actually protected Israel from disease at a time when there was zero knowledge about bacterial contamination and the spread of communicable illness. God is good! I do enjoy our class discussions, too. I just have a hard time getting excited about doing the homework.

Really though, I think my main problem here is with the video accompaniment to the study. We watch them every week, and for a start, this series' video lecture is twice as long as it is normally. It's a Thursday evening, I'm tired--I do not want to be in a darkened room watching a video for an hour. A half hour is about all I can take.

Secondly, the lady who is teaching it this time, while a very educated & astute person (she actually founded Precepts), has a teaching style which drives me absolutely insane. She does not have any clear organization to her lecture--no start point, no end point. She jumps around the Bible (not a bad thing by itself, but annoying when there doesn't seem to be a point or clear line of thought tying it all together) and has this habit of addressing her audience as "Precious one". Ok, this was probably filmed before the LOTR trilogy came out, but every single time she says it I just picture Golem saying, "My preeeeecioooouusssssssss..." I just can't stand it! And it's so cheesy televangelist! Hate it!

It is bad enough that it is souring me on the whole study. I like learning about Leviticus, but I'm driven absolutely batty by these videos. Absolutely. And I feel bad because I know so many other people get so much out of them, but I just don't like them.

So now I am debating what to do. I know it's my bad attitude that is influencing how I feel about the whole study, and I really feel like I need to finish the study. But if I am just being dragged into really negative territory every week by these videos, what good is that? I'm thinking about calling the leader and telling her honestly how I feel about the videos, and saying I am just not going to stay for the video portion. But is that a cop-out? I know she has a lot of good things to say, I am just not hearing them over the annoyances.

I know what I need to do. I need to pray for God to let me hear the teaching without the annoyances. I need to pray that He will give me the diligence to finish this study & make time for it. I know I need to do that. But I don't want to. I will do it anyway, to be obedient. I hope God blesses that obedience. And I am SOOO looking forward to my summer study, which I'm doing by myself. It's Beth Moore's book about David. I LOVE Beth Moore's studies, so I'm really looking forward to saying "adieu" to Leviticus and digging in about David. Only three more weeks....three more weeks...