A Glorious Arrangement

The first animal I ever killed with a gun was a pheasant.  I had been deer hunting several times as a teenager, but never had success.  In my early 20’s a friend of mine got me interested in shooting sports, particularly shotgun shooting, and specifically the discipline of sporting clays.  Sporting clays is a shotgun sport in which a shooter goes from station to station and shoots a set of targets.  The presentation of targets is different at each station.  Once a station is complete, the shooter walks a short distance to the next station, with all new targets.  It’s kind of like golf – but with a shotgun. 

After my friend and I had shot several times together, he invited me on a pheasant hunt.  I agreed to the hunt, although I was a bit nervous.  I had never been pheasant hunting before, and I certainly wanted to be safe.  I had never walked a field, hunting live game before, and I was concerned about the safety of the situation.  Plus, as strange as it sounds, I had never killed anything with a gun before, and I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it. 

When we got to the field where we were hunting, we met a guide who would walk with us and run the hunting dogs.  I told him about my trepidation, and said that this was my first time, and that the closest I’d ever come to something like this was shooting sporting clays.  He acknowledged my timidity, and we started to walk the sorghum field, looking for pheasants.  Not long after we started, a pheasant flushed right in front of me.  I pointed the gun and fired.  The bird, which had been in the air, dropped like a brick into the waiting mouth of one of the German short-hairs, who immediately brought it to the guide. 

“Just like sporting clays, eh?” he jokingly said to me as he stuffed the expired pheasant into his hunting vest.  Actually, it wasn’t.  It was easier.  Sporting clay targets are small and fast.  Pheasants are big and slow by comparison. 

After that shot, I took a second to think about what just happened.  I felt no remorse; no guilt for taking a life.  Instead, I was overcome by a sense that the whole point of that bird’s life was to flush at that exact moment to be killed by me.  It was clear to me that these animals had been created by God for me, and that pheasant did exactly what it was designed by God to do.  God created it to live in that field; God put the fear of man into that bird and created it to flush when it felt threatened; God gave it the wings and capacity to fly; God gave it its remarkably colorful and beautiful feathers; God brought it to that exact square inch of land in all the world at that second of time so that it would fly into the air and receive the lead shot that came out of my barrel at 1200 feet per second.  That bird belonged to God, but he gave it to me. After the hunt, we cleaned the birds we had shot and ate them.  Sustenance provided by God to live another day.  What a glorious arrangement.

Excerpt from "A Glorious Arrangement: Christian thoughts on hunting, fishing, and creation" by Joel Detlefsen