I started skiing when I was 5 years old. It is something that I enjoyed doing with my dad. I now enjoy this sport with my own family. I even met my husband for the first time at Snowbasin Ski Resort. This past time has become a huge part of our family. My son Merrick and my daughter Malan were on the Snowbasin Ski Race Team and Chris and I were coaches. Part of our jobs during races as coaches was to do race course maintenance. This is where after every racer a coach follows behind the racer and uses their skis to smooth the course line out for the next racer. You see ski courses can get very bumpy and become very rough. If we as coaches did not do this the last racers course would be a wild ride!

Just like a race course our lives can get pretty bumpy and rough. Whether it is by circumstances, broken dreams, hurts, evil others have done to us or wrong choices we have made. I am so thankful that God is willing to go ahead of us and smooth our path. God promises that He will restore our life. He will restore His children because we are the church.

This I believe is where we need to take being God's Church seriously. If He is willing to restore us we need to do our part to stay on the course He wants us on and along the way help others on their course. 

Haggai 1:7-11 says;

This is what the Lord Almighty says: "Give careful thought to your ways.  Go up into the mountains and bring down timber and build my house, so that I may take pleasure in it and be honored," says the Lord.  "You expected much, but see, it turned out to be little. What you brought home, I blew away. Why?" declares the Lord Almighty. "Because of my house, which remains a ruin, while each of you is busy with your own house.  Therefore, because of you the heavens have withheld their dew and the earth its crops.  I called for a drought on the fields and the mountains, on the grain, the new wine, theolive oil and everything else the ground produces, on people and livestock, and on all the labor of your hands."

But God gives us this promise in Joel 2:25-26 

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten, the great locusts and the young locust the other locusts and the locust swarm-my great army that I sent among you. You will have plenty to eat, until you are full and you will praise the name of the Lord your God who has worked wonders for you.

I look at God as our Course Crew Leader. He wants to smooth our course in life when things get bumpy. He doesn't only want us to start the race well He wants us to finish the race well. Whether our life is short or long He wants to restore us, His church so that we can hear those glorious words "Well done my good and faithful servant.