Deer Blind Pondering

I went deer hunting yesterday. More precisely, I went deer "scouting". My brother and his son, the deer hunters, called and invited me to join them for an afternoon hunt. My job was to sit in the elevated blind, downwind of their more strategic location, and let them know when the deer cautiously crept out of forest cover. This job doesn't require much except quiet watchfulness. My mind was free to wander other territory. So it went to topics covered in recent news stories associated with the presidential election and other ballot issues.

The stories were related to abortion and same sex marriages. With plenty of time on my hands, I extracted these topics out of the election context, out of the news stories, and pondered them. In other words, in my thinking, they were isolated from anything else; isolated from religious organizational zeal and isolated from political activist ferver. I wanted to simply examine them there in my hands for what they are in a common sense way. The result was a very odd sensation.

It is odd to me that there is any controversy at all over these issues. It is odd that so many highy educated and wordly wise folks disagree on the obvious. These issues didn't always cause such heated discussion. Now that we have the advances in science and technology, more and more are college educated, and communication and information is literally at our fingertips, we are collectively more confused than ever. As someone wiser than me said, it appears that some "have educated themselves into imbecility".

The fact that our country is so sharply divided on something so fundamental is frightening. These issues are the most basic of societal building blocks; life and family. It doesn't get any more elementary. If we continue to have such a large disagreement about what constitutes taking human life and what marriage is, we will (mark my words) rip ourselves apart.

There were no deer that afternoon, but the time went quickly. As the sun set over my right shoulder, the wind died down, and a chill came to the night air. I remembered that we should pray for our leaders, and especially the president. I shuddered in the cold (or was it fear?). I will be praying passionately for our new president and I sincerely hope that he will do the same.