Hunting for Joy
Do you remember your first deer?
I do.
It was opening morning in 1998. I was thirteen years old.
The rule in our family was that we couldn’t hunt until we were thirteen, so I had waited a long time for that morning.
The night before, I laid everything out. Clothes ready. Gun ready. Everything packed.
The break-action 20 gauge I got for my birthday wouldn’t throw a slug, so I was hunting with Grandpa’s old Winchester Model 12. Talk about an upgrade.
Dad and I climbed into an old wooden ladder stand with a hang-on stand attached to the tree beside it. I can still picture it.
There was a hard frost that morning. The woods were still as darkness slowly gave way to daylight. If you’ve spent much time hunting, you know there is something special about watching the sun come up from a deer stand. But there’s nothing quite like it when you’re thirteen. Every sound means something. Every crunch in the leaves might be a deer. Every shadow deserves another look.
And then it happened.
A little four-point buck hopped out of the thicket. I can still picture him breaking the line between the thicket and the cut bean field. It's a scene I can recall at any time. The buck took a couple of steps into the field, and Dad whispered the word I had been waiting to hear:
“Shoot.”
Boom.
The buck didn’t make it two steps. My first deer.
I’ve hunted a lot of mornings since then and forgotten plenty of details from plenty of hunts. But not that one. I remember the frost, the stand, and Dad sitting beside me. We sat there as my nerves settled, gazing at that buck lying in the field. Unknown to me, Dad had packed a couple pops for us. For some reason, I can still taste the Pepsi I drank out of a glass bottle afterward.
Funny how that works. There are some firsts you just don’t forget.
Years later, I got to experience a first deer all over again. Only this time, I wasn’t the thirteen-year-old sitting beside my dad - I was Dad. My oldest son, Russell, decided he was ready to hunt.
Things looked a little different for him than they did for me. Instead of an old wooden ladder stand, we had a box blind, a heater, and his rifle securely resting on a BOG tripod. We had done everything we could to give an eight-year-old kid the opportunity to be safe, comfortable, and successful.
If I’m being truthful, getting Russell his first deer became one of the things I wanted most out of that season.
I had killed a lot of deer before. I knew what that felt like. But I wanted him to feel it—the anticipation, the waiting, that sudden rush when a deer finally appears, and the moment when all the practicing becomes real.
It was a long season. Trying to get the right deer, at the right pace, in the right place for an eight-year-old to take aim proved to be no small task.
On the last day of rifle season, it finally happened.
A deer stepped out. Russell got ready.
Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about trail cameras, food plots, antler size, wind direction, or any of the other things we hunters spend an incredible amount of time worrying about. I was just watching my son experience something for the very first time. Something about watching his joy reminded me of mine.
And somewhere in that moment, I realized something else.
Maybe that morning in 1998 wasn’t just one of my favorite hunting memories.
Maybe Dad was making one of his, too.
At thirteen, all I could see was the deer lying in the field. Now, sitting beside my own son, I understood the other side of the story.
That’s one of the strange things about growing older. The things we love can become complicated.
When you’re a kid, you just want to hunt. You don’t care what brand of bow somebody shoots. You don’t need six cellular cameras sending pictures to your phone. You aren’t worried about whether a buck will score 130 or 150 inches or comparing your property to somebody else’s on social media.
You just want to go, sit beside Dad, and hopefully see a deer.
And if somebody tells you that you can skip school to do it? Even better.
Somewhere along the way, though, something that was once simple can become complicated. If we’re not careful, something we once loved can slowly become something we simply do.
I wonder if the same thing can happen with Jesus.
Can something we once saw with wonder become so familiar that we stop seeing what’s really there?
In Revelation 2, Jesus sends a message to the church in Ephesus. This wasn’t a church that had abandoned everything it believed. Jesus actually commends them for quite a bit. They worked hard. They endured. They recognized false teaching. They hadn’t quit. From the outside, a lot looked right.
But Jesus saw something deeper.
“But I have this complaint against you. You don’t love me or each other as you did at first!”— Revelation 2:4 NLT
Other translations put it this way: “You have abandoned the love you had at first.”
That’s a sobering sentence. Apparently, it is possible to keep doing the right things while losing something at the center of it all.
The Ephesian believers knew the Gospel. Paul had written to them years earlier and reminded them exactly where they had come from.
They had been dead in their sin.
But God.
God was rich in mercy. He loved them and made them alive with Christ. They had been saved by grace—not because they earned it, deserved it, or worked hard enough for it. (Ephesians 1 & 2)
Grace was a gift.
How do you ever get over that? And yet, somehow, we do.
Maybe that's what some of us need to remember.
Not simply a time when we went to church more, read our Bible more, or felt more spiritual.
Remember the grace.
Remember what Jesus actually did.
You were dead in sin, and He gave you life. You were guilty, and He offered forgiveness. You could never earn your way to God, so Jesus came to you.
The cross. The empty tomb. Mercy you didn't deserve and a salvation you could never earn.
Amazing grace.
Maybe there was a time when that actually amazed you.
And maybe somewhere along the way it became familiar.
Jesus’ instruction to Ephesus was simple:
“Look how far you have fallen! Turn back to me and do the works you did at first.”— Revelation 2:5 NLT
Hunting for Joy. Remember Your First.
Remember & Return.
Maybe what we’re missing isn’t something new.
Maybe we need to remember what we loved at first.
Watching Russell shoot his first deer took me back to being thirteen—to that old wooden stand, the frost, Grandpa’s gun, Dad beside me, and that little four-point stepping out of the thicket.
That's what remembering can do.
Sometimes it takes us back and helps us rediscover what mattered in the first place.
So as another deer season begins, when the alarm goes off long before daylight, you pull on that old camo, and your boots crunch through the frost—when the woods slowly wake up around you and the eastern sky begins to glow through the trees—pay attention to that old excitement stirring inside you again.
Let it remind you.
Not only of your first hunt, but of something infinitely greater.
Remember the grace that once amazed you.
Remember the cross.
Remember the empty tomb.
Remember the first time you understood that Jesus saved you—not because you were good
enough, but because He is.
Remember your first hunt.
Remember your first joy.
And most importantly,
Remember your first love - that's how you go hunting for joy.
Watch our adventure here:
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