I have had a hard time being able to purchase hunting equipment because my budget is so tight (I tell ya, George Washington's head is all out of shape when I take a bill out of my wallet because it's been squeezed so hard! :)

Anyway, at my small group meeting a few weeks ago, we were discussing the pastor's sermon from the week before.  It was on "Life at a Crossroads in my finances", and one of the discussion questions was along the lines of "which of the pastor's main points do you struggle with the most?"

When it was my turn, I said I struggled with "reordering my priorities".  Every time we had some extra money coming in, I wanted to buy something hunting related, like a shotgun or a deer rifle (since I had neither).  But there was always something more pressing that the money NEEDED to go for, so I had to put off my purchase (again). 

Well, during our fellowship/snack time, our leader came over to me and asked me for directions to my house, because he had something he wanted to give me.  I told him how to get there, but I worried all night that he might be trying to give us some money because we had been struggling at the time.  I didn't want him to feel obligated to give us something like that.

I was concerned all night, but something occurred to me that I didn't dare hope for.  I just put that out of my mind and waited until he came over the next morning. 

When he arrived, he asked me to come out to his car, and the thing I didn't dare hope for was coming true!  He had a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun in the back of his car, and he was GIVING it to me!  Not only that, but he also gave me a gun cleaning kit, a folding stool that had a zippered pocket (with 3 boxes of shells in it!), a camo shirt and pants, a camo head cover, and an orange vest.  To top it all off, he gave me a skeet trap and 2 boxes of clays!

I was about to faint!  He told me that he used to go dove hunting, but he had not been in a long time, and the gun had not been used in over 4 years.  He couldn't see keeping it in his basement (finished) gathering dust when someone else could get some use out of it.

I praise God for His goodness and mercy!

I am a relatively new deer hunter, although I did a fair amount of small game hunting as a teenager. I always had to go out to the country and borrow my cousin's shotgun, but then again, the squirrel were more plentiful out there.

When I got married, I always wanted to continue the hunting pleasure, but I just couldn't afford the supplies. After a while, that dream just got buried amongst the hum-drum routine of married life. Every chance I could get to obtain some fresh or frozen venison from a hunter friend, though, I took it.

Eventually, the strains of wanting children but never being able to have them wore on my wife until our marriage finally ended after 18 years. I moved in with my brother to heal from the divorce, and God used him to direct me to a local church with a fantastic divorce recovery support group. After a time, God used that group to introduce me to a woman who had the same heart as I did - the fervent desire to help other people heal from divorce the way God had helped us heal. We've been married for 5 1/2 years now, and her son is, to me, just like the son I never had.

After moving in with my brother, the hunting bug bit me again, and I got more and more interested in actually trying to hunt deer. However, the financial pressures were still on me, and even to this day I don't have my own rifle or shotgun yet. I began watching the hunting shows on TV (Outdoor Channel, Versus, etc.), and the desire grew and grew.

Finally, last year I found a friend who let me go with him and borrow his shotgun. I was so excited I could hardly sleep the night before. We met at his house, stopped by the local gas station / restaurant for a biscuit, then hit the road. We saw a couple of does on the way to his property, but once we got there, the activity stopped. Before shooting light, we got set up to wait. I was so inexperienced, I had a fold-up camp chair and was sitting just on the edge of a clearing where there were a lot of tracks. But did I see anything? NO! I heard some twigs snapping and leaves crunching, but nothing came out where I could see it.

A week or two later, we went again, and this time I used his ladder stand to get higher so I could see farther. I could see all right. I saw plenty of squirrels playing on some fallen logs, and I saw plenty of birds flying overhead. But deer? They were nowhere to be found. I still enjoyed the time spent in nature, but I was so desperately wanting to actually SEE a deer, even if I didn't get a shot at it.

And so ended the 2006 season for me. All the next year I was preparing for this season, but it seemed like every time I was getting ready to buy a rifle, something would come up to where we needed to spend the money elsewhere. Once deer season opened in 2007, I was again without the necessary equipment. AND, since I have been out of contact with my friend from last year, I didn't have a place to go, either. But my loving wife, who knows how much this means to me, did something I never expected her to do. She talked to her ex-husband one day when he was picking up their son for visitation, and she arranged for me to borrow one of his deer rifles. I could have smothered her with hugs and kisses that day!

Well, I still needed a place to hunt, but Julie took care of that, too. She is a special needs bus monitor for our county, and her driver has 15 acres way out in the woods but not too far from our house. Her driver offered me her back yard any time I want to come over, and she even told me where and when the deer usually come out of the woods into the yard.

Once I finally was able to take the time to go over there, it was a very cold morning. Perfect for deer movement, but I didn't realize just HOW cold it would be. I put on my camo shirt, jeans, hunter orange vest, hat, socks and shoes, and went over before dark to set up. It was perfect (or so I thought)...enough moonlight to see to get set up, a woodshed with half-walls that made a perfect gun rest, a chair behind the half-wall to sit in, looking straight at the natural funnel that the woods made in the lower end of her back yard, and a gun with plenty of ammo. I was elated.

As time went on, though, I realized just HOW cold the morning was. The gun barrel began to feel more and more like a block of ice instead of metal, and I kept having to put my hands in my pockets to keep the cold at bay. By daylight, I don't know if I could have pulled the trigger if I wanted to. All around me, I could hear guns going off in the distance, but I still had not seen anything. I didn't know if I had done something wrong or if it was just me. I had used scent elimination spray, so I didn't think it was that, and I wasn't readily visible from the woods since I was up under the shed in the shadows.

Around 8:30 that morning, I finally had to just give up and go home. My first solo deer hunt, and all I got from it was bronchitis. But that won't stop me from going back out. I'll just have to prepare even better next time.

Well, I kept going back over and over again, and I even bought me a grunt call, but I kept getting skunked. That is, until the morning of Christmas Eve. I went over to Ms. Jeannette's house, frustrated at myself for not getting out before sunup, but I decided to go anyway. I got over there and got set up, and started blowing some grunts. I had heard that it was better to blow a few grunts and wait a while before grunting again, but that morning I just decided to keep on blowing. I guess I averaged a grunt about every 1.5 seconds or so, glassing around every so often.

After only about 15 or 20 minutes, I was glassing the tree line, and all of a sudden I saw 2 beady eyes, 2 big ears, a big black nose, and antlers sticking up. My heart leaped in my chest, and my blood pressure probably spiked. I was in the shed, so I was probably in the shadows enough to where he couldn't tell what I was. I grunted softly once or twice, then I slowly leaned forward and picked up the 30/30 I had borrowed from my stepson's dad and brought it to my shoulder.

The buck stepped out, and he turned to my left. He started trotting a little across the field, and I blew a grunt to stop him. He stopped, turned around, and started slowly walking toward the place where he had come out of the woods. I sighted in on his shoulder and waited for him to stop. He stopped for a few seconds, and it was just long enough for me to slowly pull the trigger and shoot.

He hit the ground, and I lowered the rifle. I saw him just piled up on the ground, but then he started thrashing. He got up, turned, and ran into the woods, and a part of me thought "Oh, boy, now I've got to track him." But then the impact of the truth that I had actually shot my first deer EVER started to sink in, and I went crazy, whooping and hollering.

Ms. Jeannette came out first, and she was happy for me that I had finally gotten one. She went in to get her husband so he could help me track it, and I could hardly wait. I wanted to go find my deer. But I knew I was going to need help getting him out. So while waiting, I called my buddy from my Bible study group. I knew he would like to see it. But I found out that he was at work, so I just waited for Mr. Larry to come out.

We got to the edge of the woods and saw his trail, and I knew it was a good shot. Lots of blood where he had fallen, and a good trail. But we didn't really need the trail, because he had only gone about 50 yards. Getting to him was difficult, though, due to the wet oak leaves. I slipped and fell once before I even knew what was happening. When we got to him, though, it was all worth it.

He was a six-pointer, fairly good size body. I don't know how old he was, but I knew one thing...seeing as how I had never field-dressed a deer before and had only read about how to do it, I decided to let the processor do it for me. It was worth the extra $20.