Cleaning houses for fun

Am hoping this title, “Cleaning houses for fun”, has you a bit intrigued. Some of you cannot envision me cleaning much of anything besides fish and firearms. Well, today I will add a third object—deer hunting shooting houses. To be accurate(pun alert), they should be called ”sitting houses” because a lot more sitting gets done than shooting.

Generally shooting houses are small sheds 4-6 feet wide and 6-8 feet long with a ceiling height of about 7 feet. They have a metal roof and lots of small windows either always open or able to be opened. They provide a dry place to sit and watch for deer to appear. Sometimes they are on the ground, but more commonly they are elevated 8-12 feet, though we have one on our farm that is probably over 20 feet above the ground. I have acrophobia, so I have never even climbed to that one.

Shooting houses provide good, comfortable places to sit and wait on deer. I write this sitting in a shooting house where I have completely revised a textbook before, and worked on Fit Over 50, plus done lots of other computer tasks and read many a book. As I get older I hunt a higher percentage of time in these abodes.

Shooting houses also provide a good, comfortable place for various species of wasp to build their nests and raise the next generation of stingers. So, each fall, owners or leasers of said houses must go around and spray the wasps and sweep out the deer wasps and other debris that accumulated since last season. Failure to do so may result in a painful surprise for an unsuspecting deer hunter once the day warms and the wasps begin flying. In the house I sit today I had to kill over 2 dozen wasps yesterday while I was trying to hunt.

As a service to a friend, yesterday Andrew and I killed hundreds of wasps and swept and roughly cleaned 2+4+2+2+4 +3= 17 shooting houses. This took us from just before 1100 to about 2:30, with both of us working as fast as we could. It is hard, dusty work and there is a realistic danger of getting stung by irate wasps who object to tearing down their nests. We also found 3 bird nests inside the houses, one that still had eggs in it from a failed attempt last spring.

Everything, even hunting, has at least a small element of effort required, EXCEPT ONE THING. Accepting Christ as Savior requires no effort on our part, only acceptance.

Growing as a Follower of the Christ, obeying his general and particular will for us. Now that takes some work.  But it is a LOT more worthwhile than deer hunting.