Mar 23, 2010

Finding the Center

Indoor archery is all about form and focus. This was my first indoor league and I thought oh I can hit a dot 20 yards away. Ha-ha, it’s harder than I thought.
For the first year of shooting indoor league I opted to shoot in the hunter class which is your basic hunting setup. 12 inch or shorter stabilizer and either a single pin or multi pin sight with no magnification. The rings are moved out a step so the normal 10 ring is now my X ring and so forth and a normal indoor shoot is 30 arrows, 10 ends of 3 arrows.  Equipped with my hunting bow with my HHA and Postern stabilizer I entered the building. There weren’t that many people there that night so there wasn’t a whole lot of pressure but the better I do the more money I win, so the pressure was still on. As I stepped to the line I repeated my mantra I had read and adopted as my own from Bernie Pellerite’s book Idiot Proof Archery: find the center, find the center of the center, find the center of the center of the center, and by this time your release should have gone off.
So lets fast-forward to December 20th, 2009.  It’s the last end, last target and so far I have shot a 299 with 22 X’s.   As I draw I settle in and I begin my mantra: Find the center, find the center of the center, find the center of the center of the center. I can see my pin hovering in on the X ring. I begin to relax, knowing my pin is in the X, and I squeeze the release.  My aim is true. The arrow finds its mark within the X ring. What a relief!  I had done it! I had shot a 300 with 23X’s. I was and still am thrilled. There aren’t many people who can say they have done that with an open set up, much less a hunting setup with fat arrows. It was my finest moment as an archer and I wound up winning the lead in overall points winning the shoot down at the end of the season.
How thankful I am to have a “center” like Christ that I can focus on to lead and guide me!

Mar 2, 2010

Out-takes: Psalm 29:3

"The voice of the LORD is over the waters; the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over many waters." Psalm 29:3 (ESV)