How Hunting Taught Me to Live with Purpose

By: Brent Martin

Cool air, fallen leaves, harvested fields, and shorter days can only mean one thing – football. Kidding (sorry Cub fans 😉) – it means deer hunting season. I was raised by a father who taught me many things, but hunting was NOT one of them. He thought hunting was completely silly and that folks who “sat out in the cold all day strapped to the side of a tree” didn’t have a nickel’s worth of sense. I only learned to enjoy hunting after I met my wife Jessica and began trekking out with her dad and brothers. I quickly became hooked. First however, I had to swallow my pride and enroll in the hunter safety class (even as a grown man, since I never took it as a kid, Illinois still required you to take it). So, I sat for like two days in a tiny chair with a bunch of 8-year-old kids, feeling pretty out of place as the only guy who shaved daily aside from the instructors. But I passed the test (I better have if 8 years olds can!) and got my little green card and pin. Off to the deer stand I go, right? Not quite. First, I was busy reading hunting magazines, buying supplies, driving my wife nuts blowing the grunt calls, and planning where to hang my stand. The purpose led me to do the work. For some, the purpose is simply a day off work spent with “deer camp” family; for others, it’s the closeness they feel to their Creator God while in the field, or maybe just a desire to fill the freezer (for me it tends to be all of the above). Whatever the purpose, clearly a hunter has it. To my dad’s point, it’s too long of a walk out and too cold to simply be there without a purpose. That’s why he thought hunters were nuts – he didn’t find purpose in it. He found purpose in other things that led him to do the same prep work that I did in hunting. Purpose does that, it makes us act!

Fast forward 20 years, a pair of my buddies go on a self-guided antelope hunt in Wyoming. To keep the story short (with 100% certainty I’m the first guy to say that during a hunting story), they shot an antelope before realizing it was actually on private property – not the public BLM ground they thought it was. Uh oh…now what? They self-reported. What’s that? Basically, it wrecks your day’s plans, it’s a very long evening of meeting with the game warden, leading him back to the kill, riding back to town for paperwork, and getting the landowner on the phone. Thankfully in their situation, the landowner realized it was an honest mistake and chose NOT to press any charges. They went to bed that night knowing they could have gotten away with something much easier (field dress the antelope and leave). But they chose to do the right thing. These men years ago purposed to be honest and act with integrity, and you see how they responded. Purpose does that, it makes us react!

Purpose is when our actions and decisions align with what matter to us, and I think that causes us to both act and react. Acting with purpose takes time, effort, premeditation, and deliberate action. Reacting with purpose is often in response, sometimes involuntarily, to a situation. I hope that I can both act and react with purpose.