God's Great Outdoors

Announcer: Many of our guests have been deeply entrenched in hunting and fishing their entire life. It just comes naturally to them. Then there are others that didn't have anyone to show them how to enjoy the outdoor adventures and they learned on their own a little later in life.

On this week's program we'll learn from a pastor what it takes to learn on your own to hunt. We'll hear of mishaps and mistakes that brought a little knowledge because of learning from your mistakes. Learning how to hunt and fish can be somewhat like the sanctification process that all believers in Jesus Christ can go through.

We get better and better in life as a Christian learning from the mistakes that we make and in the end we hope to be better at whatever it is we choose to do by learning from our mistakes and trusting God. Let's join our host now and hear about the mishap and mistakes that come along with learning the outdoors on your own. Let's head out into God's great outdoors on the Trail to Adventure.

Dean Hulce: Welcome to God's Great Outdoors. We're on the Trail to Adventure today in Bryan, Ohio and we're at New Hope Community Church, correct?

Jason Clarke: Yes, sir.

Dean Hulce: And we are with Jason Clarke. Jason, good to have you.

Jason Clarke: Great to be here.

Dean Hulce: Jason, all over in Ohio, you are a Michigan resident originally anyhow.

Jason Clarke: Yes, that's where I grew up.

Dean Hulce: I gotta ask on the football scene. What?

Jason Clarke: Go Blue all day long. Yes. Living behind enemy lines here, too, is not fun, so it makes you appreciate the rivalry a little bit more.

Dean Hulce: About half of my board for God's Great Outdoors is in the Dayton area. I don't say much until Ohio State gets beat, then I let them know and remind them of it. I actually am a Michigan State fan more than... although in football there's no reason to be a Michigan State fan.

Jason Clarke: Not right now, but I will say my wife and I grew up Iron Mountain Kingsford. She grew up in Iron Mountain, went to Iron Mountain schools where Tom Izzo went and Steve Mariucci. I have a brother that's got a claim to fame of intercepting two Mariucci passes in one game in high school.

Dean Hulce: Really? Oh wow, that's cool.

Jason Clarke: That's where Linda and I grew up in the Upper Peninsula and it was a great place to live. Like you said, you grew up in the only place that's not really pretty.

Dean Hulce: Yes, that is for sure. And that was the greater Detroit area. I used to say West Branch was the northern boundary of Detroit. Now I say the bridge. On weekends, that's the way it is really. Petoskey, places like that aren't bad, but it still gets busy. So we're at the New Hope Community Church and you're the worship pastor?

Jason Clarke: Yes, the worship pastor.

Dean Hulce: And that's not what you're trained in?

Jason Clarke: No. I actually went to culinary school right out of high school and worked in the restaurant industry for 18 years. Various restaurants, one of them for 12 years, and then I worked in institutional life for a little while at a nursing home as an assistant food service director. That was a little bit different than the restaurant world but still utilized a lot of the same skills. It was way more family friendly for sure.

Dean Hulce: If you were running your own restaurant, that would be... as I told you our grandson had thought about going, and actually the guys from Boyne Highlands had suggested he goes because he loves to cook and actually he's one of the best wild game cooks I've ever met. But when he found out what it was going to take if he ever wanted to have his own, the time commitment to it, and he loves to hunt and loves to be outdoors, he said that wasn't a good match.

Jason Clarke: No, it's not. It's basically that's your life now is running the restaurant.

Dean Hulce: So how did you go from the food world into ministry?

Jason Clarke: I grew up around music. I sang my whole life. I went to a small private school where you were required to be in choir and band and things of that nature. I had an early music background, took piano for a long time, and so I was just always around that world.

When my wife and I got married, I began serving a little bit more frequently as a worship team member at the church we were going to. That morphed into having the worship pastor at that church approach me and say, "Hey, would you be interested in me mentoring you to be a worship leader?" Opportunities came and one thing led to another and all of a sudden there was a campus that was opening in the Detroit area of the church we were members of and they asked me to be the worship pastor there part-time.

I did that for three years and doing that, it was pretty obvious to me that I felt, and my wife and I felt, like God was calling us into full-time ministry. It just began this search of what does that look like? We have no idea where to begin and so we sold our house in 2012, moved in with her mom and dad so that we'd be flexible to go wherever God called us. Bryan, Ohio just came up. It was a really cool experience the way God morphed it all together, never having heard of Bryan, Ohio before we came in contact with some of the people here. We've loved every minute of living here.

Dean Hulce: Never hearing of Bryan is not unusual because you got big towns like Bryan and Archbold and Defiance. Not a whole lot of big towns around here, although you're not very far from Toledo here. You're one of the first guys that I think I've ever met that spent any time with it that likes the outdoors but you didn't grow up hunting. In Michigan, that's kind of an unusual thing. Maybe not in Detroit so much but the rest of the state.

Jason Clarke: I didn't have anyone in my family that hunted. I was never opposed to hunting, I just didn't really have that "in" that you would look for. I never really pushed it. I had some friends that hunted here and there. I'm sure if I had really tried, I could have pushed my way into figuring it out, but I just never did.

When we moved here, as my son got older, a lot of people here hunt and a lot of people we got to know really well hunted. I had some conversations with them about that and as my son grew up, he got more and more interested in the outdoors and we started fishing a lot. Then that just lent itself to him saying, "Dad, can we go hunting?" I'm like, "I have no idea how to begin, but let's talk."

I talked to some friends and said, "Steer me in the right direction." I actually had a friend give me a compound bow at one point and then my excuse of not having something to hunt with was gone. It's not a cheap sport to start out. We were heavily invested financially in fishing and I'm like, "Man, it's just a whole other sport to start buying stuff for and it's a whole other rabbit's hole of money."

Once he gave me that bow, I started shooting it and getting a little bit more proficient with it. Then I had some opportunities from people who had land who said, "If you want to come out and hunt, you can." Actually our lead pastor, Mike Elkins, took me out on my first hunting trip. I went through the whole hunting course and took me a little while to get through it all and get certified.

We went out right before Thanksgiving seven years ago. I sat in a blind and saw absolutely nothing and did that a couple days in a row. Then I took my son out and he got to sit with me and he did really well. We never shot a deer that year but we sat quite a few times and then it was, "Okay, now I know what I'm doing, at least for what to expect, here's what I need." So the next few years were much better.

Dean Hulce: How long have you been doing it?

Jason Clarke: I think it's been seven years now that we've been doing it.

Dean Hulce: Any big bucks in your history?

Jason Clarke: I've shot... the biggest buck I shot was a seven-point, but it was a big wide seven-point a few years back. My son actually shot a really big buck this year, which was great. It was really fun to be with him. He's involved in sports at school and like I said, he's going to be 15 next month.

I'm looking at when he turns 16, here in Ohio, he can hunt by himself. I had in the back of my mind, "I don't know how many more opportunities to hunt with him I'm going to have." So we sit together almost all the time and I told him, "When you're with me, because I go out sometimes without him, if a big buck comes by, you're shooting whatever comes by."

If it's a big buck, that's great, I'm not worried about getting it. We had seen a couple of big bucks wandering around this property we were hunting and sure enough one morning, it just was a really neat morning. Everything just came together exactly the way you need it to and he stood there long enough for him to make a good shot and it was just so fun to be with him because that could legitimately be the last big buck I see with him that he's able to get.

Dean Hulce: Was it a bow kill or a gun kill?

Jason Clarke: Crossbow.

Dean Hulce: Really? That's awesome. There's something special. I grew up with my dad and some of my earliest memories are really with my dad and one of them was the very first time was in the woods and I can remember, I was probably five years old, and I can remember it like yesterday. Then being together with him, I remember him... and this has got a great spiritual relationship to it... but I was walking behind him in the woods and when you're trying to be really quiet and sometimes your kids drag their feet or step on a twig or something.

I'm walking behind him and I snapped a twig. He was sneaking really quietly and we were small game hunting. I'm not sure what we were sneaking up on or if we were, but I snapped that twig and he turned around and my dad had a look about him when you messed up. But he didn't and he turned around and he knelt down in front of me and he showed me where to place my feet.

He showed me where to walk in his steps and how to be careful, how to roll my foot so I could feel if there was a limb there so I didn't snap it. It was such a great example of our Heavenly Father of being there in front of us showing us exactly how to walk. When we veer away from that, we pay a price because it takes a while to get us back, sometimes it's a painful way to get us back.

But I remember that plain as day and that was probably 50 years ago, maybe even a couple more than that because I was fairly young. But those are some of the earliest memories and those things you'll have with your son. You guys will never forget him shooting that buck or the special time after shooting the buck is sometimes the best time with a father-son.

Shortly before my dad died, we sat together in Wyoming. I had actually chased this really big mule deer to him where he couldn't get to it and we sat for four hours just on a little rock right next to that deer and talked about things that we had never talked about and within a couple years he was gone. That was a great experience for me and for him too, I'm sure. Let's take a quick break. We'll let Adam come on and share with everybody who it is that makes this show possible by donations and then also how they can come alongside us. We'll be right back with God's Great Outdoors.

Adam: For the last 26 years, God's Great Outdoors' Trail to Adventure has been broadcast out to win men and women, boys and girls, to Jesus Christ. This is only possible by the generosity of our listeners. Thank you to all who have supported us in the past. God has blessed us because of you, and we pray that you feel his blessings as well.

Additional underwriting support has been provided by: Matthews Archery, the leader in the archery industry; Mission Archery, with revolutionary crossbow technology; Three Rivers Archery, supplying everything you need to make your own traditional archery equipment; Hunter Safety Systems, saving lives is what we do; and Conviction Game Calls. At Conviction, we don't separate work from our faith. We believe that our faith should be evident in every aspect of our lives and the outdoors is one of the best places to share that.

God's Great Outdoors has produced many ministry tools including tracts, DVDs, and books to help you reach others for Jesus Christ. You can access these items, other God's Great Outdoors items, and so much more at our website, godsgreatoutdoors.org. That's godsgreatoutdoors.org.

Dean Hulce: Welcome back to God's Great Outdoors, the Trail to Adventure again. We are in Bryan, Ohio at New Hope Community Church and it's really a nice church. How big of a church do you have here?

Jason Clarke: I would say on an average weekend we're running 700, 800 if you count kids. For a small town, it's a big church.

Dean Hulce: And you are the worship pastor. I did get a chance to... we were playing some games last night and we had some music on. I forget who we had on, some Christian music, and then it went to one of your services. I did get to hear you sing. You've got a beautiful voice. You have some other people in your group too that have beautiful voices.

Jason Clarke: Really do. Very blessed.

Dean Hulce: We were raised in a church that maybe not when I was real young it wasn't that way, but later on we had nobody that was a worship pastor at that time. At that time you had a volunteer that was running the music, but we had five or six people that could really do a good job with it. For a small church we were really blessed with it. It's important. You can literally lead into worship with the right heart and the right music and everything else.

We were talking before about your relatively new love for hunting. That's new for me because I was almost born in a deer stand, I think. But you and I had talked during the break and you were raised in, it's getting more and more common all the time, but you weren't raised by your parents. You were raised by your grandparents. Could you tell us a little bit about that experience or that life?

Jason Clarke: My biological mom was an addict and just had all sorts of challenges with that growing up. It really started after I was born, but she was 19 when she got pregnant with me, wasn't married, and it was very obvious right away to my grandparents that she wasn't going to be capable of caring for me the way that you would hope someone would care for a newborn child.

After six months or so of them pleading with her to allow them to raise me or at least help, she decided to do that. Really since I was a baby, my grandparents raised me and I didn't know any different until I found out I was adopted. I think I was nine or ten at that time.

It didn't change anything for me at all. It was an interesting situation. My biological mom was in my life and part of my life growing up. At the time, I thought she was my sister because of the dynamic of it. It probably was easier for my brain to comprehend at that time. Just keep it as normal as possible until I'm a little bit older and understand.

When I found out that this was the dynamic, it was just fine, let's move on. Looking back, there are so many things that I see God's provision in hand moving in my life and protecting me from who knows what kind of a life I would have had had I grown up in the world that Kim, my biological mom, grew up in.

My grandparents raised me in a Christian home. I called them Mom and Dad. I still call them Mom and Dad. My dad passed away 17 years ago or so. My mom is still around. She's 85 almost and she is as spry as ever. I love her dearly and it's just been awesome to see. My biological mom actually passed away six or seven years ago from addiction. It was a wild life that I was saved from for sure, and I can never thank God enough for putting me in the place that he did.

Dean Hulce: When you look back and you can see that, you can see the hand of God like you said. We had the same similar situation and we've talked about Micah, our grandson, on here and we were blessed. We were 41 when our kids had grown, so we were pretty young and ready to be on our own. It seems strange at 41 to be on your own. Usually it comes at 18 or 19.

When we got Micah with us, we wasn't sure that was what was going to happen. I mean, that wasn't our plan and that's not really God's perfect plan in the beginning. His perfect plan is not for that, but his plan for where he already knew you were going to be and where he was going to use you.

It's the same thing with Micah. I can't imagine life any different. Like you said, it's just life for you, it was just life. When you think, and I think Micah and actually Micah's parents, both mother and father, have both told us later on that who knows where he'd have been. God had that planned. He knew what was coming. He wasn't surprised by what happened, as painful as it is sometimes.

Micah has been, I got to sit with Micah for his first buck like with your son. I got to sit with him for his first buck and we got to spend that time. We've called turkeys together. He loves the Lord. He just got done with Bible college in Wyoming actually, Frontier School of the Bible in Wyoming. He plays guitar and is actually on an internship right now in Utah. He plays on the worship team there and leads youth there.

It's very similar. It's interesting because I told you earlier that he is one of the best wild game cooks I've ever met and he just learned it all on his own. Although I love to cook, he just took it and just ran with it. It's a passion for him. This whole connection is pretty interesting because although he's a pretty good hunter, he's done really well and he loves to... he doesn't want to go do the easy thing. He's always pushing himself to find the harder way to hunt. One of your passions, although you're not deeply rooted in hunting, you are deeply rooted in fishing.

Jason Clarke: Yes, I am. I grew up fishing. That was always a passion of mine. Anytime I could get to the lake, which was usually Lake St. Clair in the Michigan area, I'd be out there with a pole trying to catch whatever would bite that day.

When we moved here and as life got busier, getting into college, all through working and getting married early and all the things that happened, there weren't as many opportunities for me to go fishing. As my son started getting older, he wanted to go fishing and we had some friends who had ponds.

We'd go over there and fish and it was just like this switch went off in me again going, "You love this. Why aren't you doing this again more?" That just began the deep, dark hole of buying fishing equipment and lures and accumulating gear. We eventually were able to buy a little jon boat and we went out to every little lake around here that we could.

In 2020 actually, we were blessed to be able to purchase the bass boat that we have now, a little 17-and-a-half-foot Nitro from a friend that attended here. We still use it as often as we possibly can and it's getting a little bit harder with him being in more sports. Now summers are taken up with sports and high school sports are a lot different than club sports. The time isn't quite what it used to be, but any chance we get we are on the water.

Dean Hulce: You find the time. I played most every sport when I was young. I remember Friday nights playing football games and in the fall when we got done with a game, I would go to the shower, get showered and come outside, there was a vehicle waiting for me to get to camp. You find a way to do it. We went to hunting camp, but my dad fished with us and he put us in a canoe and paddled us around. Did you ever musky fish on St. Clair?

Jason Clarke: I have done that one time with some friends a long time ago when I was a kid and they had a boat. We never caught one, but we trolled around for them for a while and it's just one of those big long waits. What do they call it, the fish of 10,000 casts?

Dean Hulce: My two boys fished a place in Canada last year. They fished an afternoon and they caught, I think, 19 muskies. So there was hardly any cast per musky. In the lake they were in and it was way back in they had to walk into it and there was a boat there they could use but they said they never had a cast all afternoon where they didn't have a follow or a strike or catch a fish. That doesn't happen very often. Lake St. Clair has got some tremendous smallmouth and also some walleye fishing in the river channels and stuff as well.

Jason Clarke: We never actually had a chance. As a kid I didn't go out on a boat a whole lot on Lake St. Clair. So for us to launch ourselves in our own boat was a little bit like, "This is a big lake. Where are we going?" We spent some time floundering around, not really finding a whole ton of fish.

All of a sudden, one magical morning two years ago now, we happened upon a small tournament that was happening. Everyone was clustered in one area. We'd been looking in that 10-to-12, 13-foot depth and I knew where they were at just outside of the Metro Park there. It's only five feet, six feet deep in that flat right there.

I was wondering what they were doing over there and I saw a lot of people throwing jerk baits and stuff. We went over there and we just ran into them. Over the next few weeks, we went up there as often as we could and they just seemed to replenish. We went up there one day and caught, between my son and I and my father-in-law, over 100 smallmouth.

It was just like you said with the muskies. This was pretty much every cast you're getting a bite, getting a bite. So it was just a really fun time. We were catching threes and fours like it was just getting old for that. So that was a fun day.

Dean Hulce: Awesome. We're going to have to bring the radio portion to a close here. We'll go on, we'll talk a little more fishing and maybe a little more hunting if you got any more stories in there. Maybe you got a mess up or two you could share.

Jason Clarke: I'm sure I do.

Dean Hulce: But we'll do that. Thank you for joining me for the radio. It was great to be here and thank you to our listeners for listening. We're going to jump into the podcast here. If you can join us, if not join us next week as we head down the Trail to Adventure in God's Great Outdoors.

Announcer: There are times when learning to do it on your own is far better than having someone else do it for you. We all enjoy a challenge but sometimes it goes better with help. Pastor Jason today shared what it's like to learn to become successful on your own and the tests and trials that come that way.

There are times when we learn best on our own but generally it's easier to have someone alongside you in your growth. The Bible tells us in Matthew 28 to go and make disciples to all nations. Making disciples is like teaching them to hunt or fish. You teach the basics, then you dig deeper into what God calls us to do. In the end, it's how we get better in our walk with the Lord.

If you're just starting out on your walk with the Lord, find someone to come alongside and ask them to help. If you've been walking with Jesus a long time, come alongside others and teach them how to best walk with him.

If you've enjoyed today's program and would like to hear the extended podcast version, you can find it by looking for Dean Hulce or Trail to Adventure wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. This program is provided by and can be contacted at: God's Great Outdoors, P.O. Box 414, Powers, Michigan 49874, or on the website godsgreatoutdoors.org. We hope that you've enjoyed hearing about the growing process today. We hope that you'll join us each and every week as we head down the Trail to Adventure in God's Great Outdoors.