I’m a pastor in the SEC. What distinguishes a pastor in the SEC is that we are the only group of people who would define where we pastor by a college football conference. It wouldn’t surprise me if in some churches after a particularly good Sunday, the congregation might start chanting “SEC! SEC! SEC!”

For the Christian men in this region, life is ordered around God, football, and hunting—although rarely in that order.

While I like football, hunting is difficult for me to understand.

Hunting combines everything I dislike about life into one event—an early wake-up call, hurting animals, cold weather, guns, and people. Of course I’m only kidding, I don’t dislike guns.

So for a few Sunday’s in the fall, men who are normally late for the 10:45am service, get up at 3am, put on 14 layers of clothing, drive to a location more remote than where the Vice President goes during a terrorist attack, hike several miles into the woods, cover themselves in animal urine, scale a tree into a deer-stand, and wait until the perfect deer comes by.

These men, who can’t wait an extra 5 minutes for their wives to get ready or who can’t sit still for a 30 minute sermon, stay perfectly still for 6 hours for fear they might scare away this elusive animal. The same animal who terrifies me when driving down the interstate at night for fear that it might kill me.

While I don’t understand hunting, I’m not opposed to it. If you want to risk your life by going into the woods surrounded by a few hundred of your neighbors who are loaded with shotguns, a few six packs, and are working off of three hours sleep, trusting that they will see your hunter’s orange and not confuse you with a six-point buck, that’s up to you.

I don’t care if you shoot it, bomb it, machete it, or jump out of the tree and wrestle it to death. If you kill it and eat it, you won’t get any judgment from me. One thing I understand far less than hunting is those who feel the moral high-ground to judge those who hunt. I don’t judge hunters for two reasons: 1) there are a whole lot more problems in the world than to worry about hunters and 2) I prefer not to judge those who are holding high-powered rifles.

Where I am from, we take hunting seriously. Many of the schools close the week of Thanksgiving not because they want to give thanks but because it is the main week of deer season. If they didn’t close, there wouldn’t be enough teachers to hold school.

In Tennessee they actually wrote a law saying that if you run over a deer you can keep it. This means some of my friends would probably have a better chance of getting a deer with their Buick on a Tennessee highway than they would in the woods of Arkansas with their Smith and Wesson.

As for me, I prefer Smith and Wollensky over Smith and Wesson, but you really can’t have the former without the latter.

When it’s dove season, make sure that after you’ve killed the bird of peace you come worship the God of peace.

If it’s duck season, bacon wrap a few bites for me.

If it’s deer season, shoot a big one but for the love of everything holy please don’t put the picture on Facebook.

Happy Friday.