Displaying pages as blocks on main page

Hey all – I have a tendency to break things, so let me share what I’m trying to do. I’m sure the error is between keyboard and seat…

I have a separate home.php page that right now I have static regular text in as well as some calls for recent posts, etc.

What I’d like to do is pipe the page text from specially created pages created in the WP dashboard into a div.

I already installed the “Exclude Pages From Navigation” plugin so that those pages don’t show up in the navigation, but I’m going through the documentation and I’m wondering if I’m missing something. It seems I can get everything else to work showing up except pages.

See, the reason is that then I can have set pages for each text block or image on the home page, so every block is user-editable.

Thanks!