I’ll just kick this shindig off by saying welcome. I’m Mary, and I’m pretty nice, most of the time at least. This blog is basically going to be stuff that’s happening to me, but I’m going to spice it up a little bit and try to make it apply to your life, too. So you won’t get too bored.

Anyway, today I went skiing. I live in Minnesota, so we don’t have any big mountains, but it’s cold enough to have snow. Because of this, I ski a lot. I’m training to become a ski instructor, which is more fun than it sounds. I like hanging out with kids. So, today I followed a class around and “apprenticed” another instructor. It served the dual purpose of giving her a second teacher to handle her class and letting me watch someone actually teach. If you’ve ever tried skiing, you know that it isn’t the easiest thing in the world to learn, and the woman I was apprenticing had a really interesting way of teaching it.

She called it stealth teaching. Like, she didn’t tell the kids what they were learning. Who likes to hear, “Well, kids, today we’re going to work on making edged parallel turns. The progression I have set up has us doing some benchmark drills and then heading off to try our skills on the black diamond”? Not me. Big words are intimidating if you don’t know what they mean. Kids would rather hear “Okay, we’re going to pretend to be cowboys. We’re going to bow our legs out like we’re riding a horse and keep our hands on our knees.” This gets the kids to do what that long explanation details, and they don’t have to worry about messing up or looking stupid because they don’t know what parallel turns or edges are. It’s pretty hard to mess up being a cowboy.

So, we went through a day like this. We did cowboy turns and went down the hill while making our hands simulate what our feet were doing. (Like, turning on the side for a turn) We looked silly during some of it, and we didn’t understand why some of it would help our skiing, but by the end of the day, those kids were carving up the hill, and they didn’t even know how it happened.

That’s my story for the day, and like I said I would, I came up with an application for it. I’m a Christian, and I follow God. I do what I think he tells me and what I know I should do (like loving people I really don’t want to love) and even stand out for him when I know I might look silly, and I do it because I want to be able to “carve up” life. Just like when those kids learned to ski the way that they are supposed to, the way that is the most efficient and rewarding, I want to learn to live the way I’m supposed to. I’m doing what Jesus says I need to do, because it’s the way to show him that I love him… because he loves me.

Philipians 3:12 “I’m not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I’m well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me.”

~Mary