Compass Course

When I was in high school I decided to join the North Henderson High School Hunter Safety team, or “shooting team” as we all called it…before it became a popular thing for kids to go shooting up schools.  On this team firearms skills were stressed and stressed over and over with firearms safety as the key.  Muzzle control, storage, loading, and safety use.  I ate this up, and I honed my skills with my shotgun and rifle the first year and I discovered the actual hunter skills portion that involved a written test drawn from hunter safety course questions and, also a compass course for orienteering.  The following years the team members talked me into joining the archery team, and that was all huge for me.  I woke up and ate and breathed this competition and it became part of nearly every conversation it seemed at the time.  (My obsessive nature coming through that may be visible in some of my other posts.)   This compass course at first was not something I was interested in, I simply participated because the team needed it to compete.  After diving into it though, I learned it best I could and really started to understand it, and understand how to navigate, and began researching it on my own.  As with everything else I tend to do I wanted to be the very best at it and know as much as I could know about it.  My nature then kicked in because it was an area nobody really wanted to participate in because it wasn’t “pulling the trigger”.  I love those areas that are left behind by so many others and I love to excel at them and make people scratch their heads not only that I would even do it, but also that I would study and practice hard enough to be so much better at them.  The angles and the lines to follow on the compass course seemed to be the only kind of math that clicked in my head...mainly because of the patterns I could visualize. 

The Course

The compass course is laid off before hand by the wildlife officers and basically the participants are handed a paper with different coordinates and with each coordinate there are yardages they must pace off.  They must then stand on the starting point and they must obtain the first compass reading from the first coordinate.  If its “17 degrees N” and “43 yards” They must then find 17 degrees N on the compass, then they must pace off to the best of their ability the 43 yards.  They then stop on that second point and find the next coordinate and pace off its yardage.  Each course will run them into a large tree or a briar patch, or a creek bed or something they must navigate around.  They must take action to get around these obstacles and it is IMPERATIVE that they work together to do this.  It is a timed event and without the other teammates one person would be taxed so hard that it would be nearly impossible to complete alone.  After they proceed through their list off coordinates and yardages they should end up on a specific point that had been pre-determined.  The distance away from this point is then measured and treated as a “bullseye”.  For instance, within 10 yards of the point they were supposed to hit, they are awarded 100 points, within 20 yards they are awarded 90 points, within 30 yards they are awarded 80 points and so on…  This is then added to their score on their written test since each event, Shotgun, Rifle, Archery, and Hunter Skills are based on a 200 point perfect score potential. 

The Comparison

The one thing that stuck with me more than anything about that compass course, I have applied so many more times in my life to so many more situations, simple yet profound.  When you start at your compass course on your starting point make absolute certain you have your exact degree reading before you begin.  If you are only a few degrees off, then it makes it worse and worse and you are further and further away by the time you get out more and more yards away from the starting point.  I look at this as a slice of pie.  If you have a triangular slice of pie, then the point that is made from where this slice joined in the very center of the circular pie is akin to the point at which you begin your compass course.  You are standing at that corner looking out, and your reading is off by a few degrees, it is not obvious at first, the first few yards you go will be very close to the line you should have been on.  The longer you pace away from that point, the further away from your proper line you get.  If you go for many yards, the gap between your line you walked and the line you should have walked is like the crust end of the slice.  You are on one corner while your proper line is on the other corner.  This means your second reading will be even further away, and your third reading will be further and by the time you get to the end of your list of coordinates, you will be disastrously far from where you should be.  In this course you unfortunately do not have anyone to stop you along the way and say that you must correct your course.  You simply end up at a point sometimes from which you cannot even see the destination you set out to achieve from the start.

The Point

This stuck in my mind so profoundly that it follows me every day.  How close is that to real life?  We all start at that point, we all have that place we are trying to go in our life, and we compromise, or we make a bad choice, or we have an unfortunate event befall us and set us on a course that is a few degrees off.  We walk, and we walk, and we walk and when we finally stop to take stock of our situation, we realize just how far from our desired destination we are.  Unlike in the competition though, in life we have mentors, we have parents, we have friends, we have family, we have pastors or books, or most particularly THE BOOK, the Bible that can steer our courses back to the proper line.  You can get back on that line and you can walk it out, but inevitably another obstacle comes along soon we must navigate around these obstacles.  Running this course alone is not possible, negotiating these obstacles alone is not possible without leaving scars.  Each obstacle costs us time and make no mistake we are living in a timed event.  Not only does each obstacle cost us time, each deviation from that line costs us time, and most likely runs us through briar patches and any number of other things that leave scars and hurt us.  No person alive will be able to hold this line through life, but the ones who do seem to stay the closest to this line are the ones who are ultimately successful.  The ones who deviate definitely, have experiences and stories to tell and scars to show off, but that line is what we all should strive for.  Without that we are just wandering. 

Psalms 119