Answering the Call

Dirk Koetje learned many life lessons, including a love for God’s creation, when his father, Don, took him hunting and fishing.

And some of the most important lessons, such as how to be a good husband and father, came while the two of them sat together for hours in a deer blind.

“My dad helped to give me a passion for connecting faith with the outdoors,” said Koetje, pastor of Prosper Christian Reformed Church in Falmouth, Mich.

“Being in the outdoors with him created a deep bond between us. My father raised me in ‘the fear and admonition of the Lord’” (see Eph. 6:4).

They hunted and fished many weekends throughout his youth, said Koetje, and he will be touching on those experiences and how they formed his spiritual life in a presentation titled “Hunting Under the Influence: Answering the Call.”

Speaking on Thursday, Sept. 15, at Bethany United Reformed Church in Wyoming, Mich., Koetje wants to encourage people to see the value in connecting one’s love for such activities as hunting and fishing to one’s love for God.

“I want to ask people to consider how we can serve and help others through the hobbies and passions we have,” he said.

“How can we serve our children, our God, and our friends by sharing with them the things we love, which is what my dad did with me?”

Koetje will be basing his presentation, he said, on Ephesians 4:1, in which the disciple Paul writes: “I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”

“We need to live fully as God called us to live in Christ,” he said. “We need to live a life in which we are called to serve in the ways that best suit us.”

While people have different callings and passions, he said, he will especially focus on being outdoors, sharing with others a love for the forests and lakes he has visited.

Dirk Koetje’s church in Falmouth is in northern Michigan near the area in which he and his father, who owns a heating and cooling business in the Grand Rapids area, hunted when Dirk was a youth.

Already, he said, he has begun in different ways to share his love for the outdoors with his own children, ages six, three and two.

“It is so important to see the beauty of creation,” he said. “I enjoy the chance to get away, to have quiet time, to slip away into the woods. I appreciate the opportunity to sit and pray and wrestle with God and think about spiritual things.”