turning 35, hunting, & being found

I turned 35 this week. 

It felt like this...

Maybe it was the sugar high from the icing on the cake or maybe the haunting feeling that the end is likely now just as close as the beginning, but I figured that now would be as good a time as any to try something new. Seeing as how habit and routine are sacred things for me, trying something new usually means ordering a different item at Starbucks in the morning. However, this time, I wanted to reach far out of my comfort zone--really stretch myself. I surprised myself when all of a sudden in the middle of a seemingly safe conversation I agreed to go deer hunting with a buddy of mine named Mark. Over the next few days I got my very first hunting license and deer tag. I felt so official and accomplished--and I hadn't even hunted yet. I got a note the night before from another woodsy friend, John, saying that he was joining us. So, flanked by two experienced hunters who were good enough friends to show me the ropes, this morning for the first time in my life I went hunting.

Now, for those of you who don't know, hunting involves long periods of silence and stillness in the woods while waiting to kill some meandering animal. Those of you who know me  realize immediately the lack of congruence here. 

For starters, there is the whole long periods of silence thing, to which I am likely not best-suited. I have been described as "chatty," and have on occasion heard someone ask my wife, "Does he always talk this much?" And apparently talking scares the deer away, so you have to just sit there mute. I expected this to be very hard, yet in reality it was easy. It was peaceful. But I don't mean that in the whole "it-was-just-me-and-nature's-glory" sort of way. What I mean is that I did not expect to find the silence so relieving. As someone who talks for a living, it was healing to my spirit to not have to fill space with words. I wonder now if this is what monks feel like who take a vow of silence. I am so noisy, and most of it is surprisingly by choice.

On the other hand, stillness was not as serious a challenge for me. I enjoy what is referred to as a sedentary lifestyle--I am possibly in danger of being overrun by a glacier. And hunting is pretty much the most sedentary outdoors "activity" I could find except for ice-fishing--which I plan to take up this winter. Still, I made my friends promise that I would not have to climb into a tree-stand. A man my size has no business climbing 15-20 feet up to sit on something smaller than a toilet seat--God did not make hippos fit for tree-climbing. So we sent John up the tree, as he is definitely not a hippo. I ended up in a pop-up tent called a "ground blind." 

God bless the great indoors

Inside the blind, I sat on a 5 gallon bucket turned upside down, which was as comfortable as it sounds. While I did not remain motionless, I stayed as still as I could. Now, I was admittedly helped by the fact that there were two of us in the tiny blind--myself and Mark, who is not as big as I am, but is also not a small man by any measure. We were a little snug in there, so there wasn't really anywhere to move to that wasn't already pretty intimate. 

It is also true that I harbor an irrational fear of guns and ammunition, and this alone has been most effective at keeping me out of the woods for 35 years now. But, this aversion to the woods has been helpful, as I also have very severe contact allergies to most any living green plant. Seeing as how gun season does not start for another few weeks, my friends had armed me with a crossbow. I had never held a bow of any kind before, but something tells me that a crossbow is to bow-hunting what gutter-guards are to bowling. So, equipped with my training-wheels I was out in the woods but inside a blind protecting me from all that leafy nature. Could life get any better? 

Now, it had dawned on me in the days leading up to my first hunting experience that I have little desire to kill anything really. But I was able to sate my mind with the observation that given my ineptitude at the whole silence and patience thing, I was not likely to see any deer; and further, that even if I had an opportunity to fire at a deer, I was almost certain to miss it due to inexperience and lack of general aiming prowess. 

Nevertheless, there I was hunting. Steam rose softly from my quiet breathing as I watched the tree-line at the other side of the clearing which itself was just being roused from the smoky jade shadows into the early dawn of a crisp autumn morning that God only makes in Michigan, when I was met by something unexpected: a friend. 

Up until that moment it had all been about me. Added to the usual self-centered myopia I live in, things were extra self-centered as I talked about my birthday and my first hunt. As a result, I honestly had not really thought all that much about Jeremy. Almost three years ago, a good friend of mine, Jeremy King, died while hunting in northern Michigan. He was only 31 years old, but had a massive heart attack and was found dead at the base of his tree-stand. In fact, it was John and Mark who had found him. And here I was in the birth of a new day with its new mercies surrounding me in the company of my friends--Mark, John, and Jeremy.

Jeremy, John, a different John, and Mark after a successful pheasant hunt

The immensity of everything met me in that clearing this morning. It was heavy at first and sacred. Then it lifted and I found breath--Spirit. It was what another friend of mine calls a thin space--where eternity and this world seem to be just a breath apart. I started to try and tell Mark, "I think I see why y'all love it out here." But that was as far as I got. I didn't say anything else--it wasn't fair to say anything else. Besides, you can't talk while you're hunting. 

I don't know that I feel all that connected to hunting... we came away empty and only saw two doe so far away that you could barely call it "seeing" them. Jeremy used to say that he felt closer to God when he was in nature. I think John and Mark feel that same way. Maybe I will too one day. But this morning, I was blessed to feel close to my friend Jeremy again. I don't know if John or Mark experienced that when they went back out their first time after Jeremy died. I don't know if they still feel it. I don't know if it will happen again next time I go out hunting, and truthfully, I am not sure I even want that. But I am so very thankful for today. 

It is interesting to me that once I get out of my routines--out of the expected and well-worn paths of my normal and routine life--I find myself encountered by mysteries more wonderful than I care to notice most of the time. I am reminded that God knows what I need more than I do.