OUTDOOR TRUTHS: The Pull

I’m pretty bummed right now. Turkey season remains closed in my home area for another week.

That’s two weeks later than it used to be just a few years ago. For some reason, I thought it had

only been pushed back one week, and I was already looking forward to a pre-Easter turkey

meal. Now it feels like I’ll be rushed just to enjoy what’s left of the season. If I had known, I

would’ve headed south and gotten started earlier. I’ll remember that next year. Or maybe I’ll just

take advantage of the delay and do some early fishing before the season opens.

But for now, my outdoor life has been reduced to mowing grass and taking a few bike rides. And honestly… I feel cooped up. There’s no doubt in my mind I was made for something beyond my present existence. I know it because of its absence. I feel it in the pull. In the yearning that wells up inside me. It reminds me of those little sea turtles that are born up in the weeds along the beach. The moment they break through the egg, they run towards the ocean. They have never been there, never seen it, and no one shows them the way to go. And yet they go. There are a thousand illustrations like that in nature. And then there’s you and me. C.S Lewis described it this way in Mere Christianity.

“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food.

A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water.

Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing.

If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.”

Lately, I have felt these urges in far more important things than turkey hunting. I

watch the news. I scroll through social media posts. I see anger, vitriol, and contempt

for anything good or Godly. Or worse, I see an apathy for anything spiritual. I see a

world that increasingly looks foreign to the one I know exists. And yet the one I know

exists, I have never seen. But I long for it. Not because I want to leave this world. But

because this world no longer feels like home. Maybe that’s because home isn’t a place.

It’s a Person and a people.

Gary Miller has written Outdoor Truths articles for 23 years. He has also written five books which include compilations of his articles and a father/son devotional. He also speaks at wild-game

dinners and men’s events for churches and associations. Stay updated on Outdoor Truths each week by subscribing at Outdoortruths.org. Miller can be reached via email at gary@outdoortruths.org.