A Ski Trip - Continued

  

I sent George Bowers's article (see previous post) to another friend of mine, Joe Bobb (Joe and his wife Sharon are longtime Navigators). Below are Joe’s observations

 

From Joe to me:

 

No pain no gain it is said, but the Germans also say, “Sport ist Mord”. (Sport is death). Yes, both fear & pride get in the way on the skis slopes of life as well as learning to walk by faith in Christ.

 

But this story reminds me of the exact same decisions I had to make numerous times while skiing the Alps in Austria. The trails, however, are clearly marked for beginners, intermediate, and advanced skiers. For me, however, after skiing for 17 years in Europe I only progressed to what I call the “advanced beginner” category. So I usually remained on the side of fear or caution when making those decisions. But even though I was 30 years old when I took it up, it was amazing how much progress I made after I decided to take ski instructions! I waisted many hours and inflicted numerous injuries by trying to learn on my own.

 

Which is similar to learning to walk by faith as a believer. Dying to self is hard. But is a pre-requisite to life. We don’t like to submit to spiritual training even after death. Our pride still gets in the way. We think we can do it ourselves without instruction. Think Paul said, “Be ye followers of me even as I am of Christ”! Trial and error produces much more progress with less failure when we first watch, follow others instructions, imitate, and then try it by ourselves. And better yet, un the community of believers . . . much like joining a ski school of others with a trained instructor!

 

 

Probably one element to learning that I left out was “correction”. And who likes even a ski instructor to tell them that they are doing something fundamentally wrong? And those who think they don’t need it (like I didn’t), suffer the consequences. A few of us stubborn, proud, hard heads might be self-taught, but it takes us much longer and we develop bad habits and poor technique that are later much harder to correct.

 

And yet within a community of believers, we so often isolate ourselves, neglect or refuse to obey the Word, 2 Tim. 3:16-17, and don’t listen to fellow followers of Christ, 2 Tim 4: 1-4, that are clearly given to us by God to help correct us along life’s path.