Your Sights Are Off. Here’s How You Know.
It has nothing to do with your rifle.
Dear Friends,
A few years ago, I sold my business. I was sixty-one, and everyone around me assumed the next word out of my mouth would be retirement. I hated that word. I’ve never golfed a day in my life, and God gave me too much health and energy to spend it chasing a ball across a green.
So, there I was. No business to run for the first time in twenty-seven years, and no target to aim at either. I called an old client, a man I respected and later found out was as serious about guns as I was, and we struck up a three-year consulting arrangement. When that ended too, I had to admit something I already knew.
I needed to adjust my sights again. It’s just how it works, you get a rhythm going, your responsibilities change, your kids get older, and the sights that used to be true go off without you noticing. Happens on the range. Happens everywhere else too.
A Season You Didn’t Sign Up For
September carries an expectation with it. New school year, new routines, a fresh run at whatever got set aside over the summer. We treat the calendar flip like it resets us.
It doesn’t. You get the same responsibilities in a new month. The same short temper with your kids. The same prayer life that’s been running on fumes since June. The season changed on the calendar. You didn’t.
I’ve hit this wall more times than I can count. A new plateau shows up, a new challenge, and the adjustment I made last year has already stopped holding. My wife and I have a name for it. We call it ‘doing life,’ (celebrating forty-seven years this month). It keeps asking you to make the correction again.
Adjusting Your Sights
Here’s what most people don’t know about sight adjustment: it’s not dramatic. You don’t overhaul your whole setup. You turn a small dial, a few clicks at a time, and you check the result before you turn it again.
The same is true off the range. After that consulting contract ended, I found a program called Life Plan. It walked me through three questions: where I was, where I wanted to be, and the steps to close the gap. Nothing about it was flashy. It was a series of small, honest corrections, the same as adjusting sights. I came out of it with a personal mission statement I still carry:
“Honoring God by sharing creative leadership with people and organizations to impact our world positively.”
Ask yourself where your sights have drifted. Your marriage? Your work? Your walk with the Lord? You won’t find the answer by staring at the target. You find it by checking the mechanism, the part of you doing the aiming in the first place.
Follow-Through Is the Proof
As my daughters were growing up, I told them the same thing more times than they probably wanted to hear, ‘judge people by their actions, not their words.’ Anybody can say they’re going to change. Anybody can promise a fresh start in September. The proof comes later, in whether they followed through on it.
That rule applies to me as much as it ever applied to them. I can talk about adjusting my sights all day. What matters is whether I turn the dial and check my work, week after week, until the correction holds. Follow-through is the part of the story nobody wants to hear about. It’s also the part that makes the rest of it true.
The Harvest Depends on the Season
Those too lazy to plow in the right season will have no food at the harvest.
(Proverbs 20:4, NLT)
That’s Proverbs, plain as it gets. The plowing has to happen when it’s supposed to happen. Wait too long, and no amount of effort in November will save your harvest.
September is your plowing season. The calendar didn’t decide that. You did, sometime back in summer, when you first noticed what needed adjusting and let it wait.
You don’t need a new rifle. You don’t need a new life. You need to make the adjustment you already know you’re avoiding, and you need to make it now, while the season still gives you room to correct.
Turn the dial.
Stay encouraged—your story is still unfolding.
Randy Abramovic
Author, “Guys, Guns and God”
