I took my girls to a park last night that has a ton of play equipment....it is one where the whole thing is built like a city connected by slides, balance beams, tunnels, things which resemble houses or trains or boats.  They played for a while and then asked me to assign them an obstacle course and time them.  I don't know why that is so fun, but I jumped on it...."okay, you have to cross this balance beam, jump from here to here, climb over the train, slide through this tunnel, climb the ladder to the slide and then run back to the beginning and touch the place where you started"....they all did it twice and then I really wanted to try it too :)  The first time I finished in 35 seconds, so I wanted to try for a better time and the second time I got through it in 33 seconds.

I was thinking about obstacles later and how much fun we had speeding through them, but how we desired a second chance through them to do better since now we understood the course and thought we could shave off some time.  BUT....We just don't get that second chance to go through it all again and adjust our strategy in life, you know....we have to do our best the first time....the only time life gives us that one obstacle at that one moment and we probably never received a practice run for that silly thing :P

So what is the strategy?   The strategy is a focus on God and a continuous refocus on God and a constant surrender to God.....You can't practice overcoming the obstacles because you don't necessarily know what those will be in your life and you won't ever be effective if you live in the fear of the unexpected obstacles, but you can practice how quickly you turn to God.  You can get really speedy at turning to God and turning it all over to God!!!  You can definitely shave a few seconds off of that :)