The Women of Duck Commander (25 page)

G
OD
P
REPARES
P
EOPLE

When Alan and I look back on our years in ministry, we have a lot to be thankful for. We worked with a truly great church, we had some exciting opportunities to travel and do mission work
overseas, and we served God alongside some incredibly faithful and really good people. We were always aware of those things. But we were not aware at the time that God had something else in store for us and that He was not only using our time in the ministry to help people in the present but He was also using it to prepare and train us for our future. Without the experiences we had and the lessons we learned back then, we would not have been prepared for the life we have today.

We often hear about people, especially young people, who are desperate to become “famous.” We see people who think everything in their lives would be wonderful if they could just make it big and become a star. Many of them do not realize there is a price for fame and that there are both positive and negative aspects to living in the public eye. Without a well-grounded life and a strong support system, being a star has the potential to devastate individuals and their families.

We believe God prepared everyone in our family in different ways for the visibility we now have. For Alan and me, living in the glass house of ministry gave us a very firm foundation for the limelight of the entertainment world. God always knows what’s ahead for all of us. In His love for us and His desire for us to be blessed, He prepares us. When Alan and I worked at the church, we never dreamed we would someday be so involved in a TV show. God trained us in the relative safety of a church setting for everything we would deal with in the realm of television. He let us grow and make mistakes in front of a small, loving audience before He put our family in front of the whole world. We are very thankful He gave us the training we needed over a period of time, among family and
friends, instead of just letting us wake up one morning with our last name as a household word.

I always want to tell people who have big dreams that we just never know what’s ahead. We have to embrace every season God takes us through, trusting that He will use each one for our good and for His glory. We have to believe that if He wants to put us in the spotlight, He will prepare us for it and do it in such a way that we can handle it well.

I cannot imagine what
Duck Dynasty
would have done to our family had we not been ready for all the changes it brought and had we not been grounded in our faith and our family. A lot of people crave overnight success, but we are glad that did not happen to us. We see the wisdom and love of God in our lives as He spent years with us behind the scenes making us ready for the high level of exposure our family has today.

T
HE
B
EARDLESS
B
ROTHER

One thing that sets Alan apart from the Robertson men who frequently appear on
Duck Dynasty
is that he does not have a beard. In fact, when the media heard he would appear on the show starting in season four, lots of headlines and articles identified him as “the one without the beard.”

By the time a large audience began to hear about Alan and about the two of us as part of the Robertson family, we were well established in knowing that very little matters in life except pleasing God, pleasing each other as husband and wife, and honoring
our family. We had learned the hard way that we could not please everyone around us, so we do not spend much energy trying. We do our best to live our lives with integrity and to love and serve the people around us. We make plenty of mistakes, but we recognize them, own them, and make our apologies. None of us has any room in his or her life to judge the others. Rather, we work to love and forgive each other. Our family has hearts that seek after God; I can say that with total confidence about each and every person in our family, and we all do the best we can to fulfill our responsibilities and enjoy the life God has given us.

W
E
W
ANT TO
B
E
G
OOD
E
XAMPLES

Because of the publicity our family receives, we are responsible for holding our standards high. We want to be good examples. That starts at home long before it shows up in front of the camera. Though I do not often appear on
Duck Dynasty
, I do participate in plenty of casual conversations about the show with my sisters-in-law and Miss Kay. We talk about the fact that the impact of everything they do is magnified because they are in the limelight. The way they dress, the way they talk to their husbands and children, the way their children talk to them, the way they control their actions, and all kinds of other things make statements about who they are. Alan’s and my children are grown, but we have grandchildren who have to learn these lessons too. We must teach each
generation about these truths. Once a show is filmed and goes on the air, they do not get a do-over and they do not get to go back and tell the world what they really meant. An audience takes things at face value and draws their own conclusions, which means first impressions are extremely important.

First impressions are just that—first impressions. You only get to make that first impression one time. If a person gets to know you and interact with you, a bad first impression can be changed. But with television, people do not get to interact with us and see us at our best. Our best has to be what we put in front of the camera every time it’s on. We hope and pray our family is making an excellent impression on the world through
Duck Dynasty
, giving people a lot of good laughs. But even more important than the laughs, we want to be true to the fact that we love God, we love each other, and we desire—through the show—to honor Him, to honor one another, and to affirm the goodness of faith, family, and the true love of Jesus.

26

IT’S NOT JUST FOR US

Missy

As Jessica mentioned earlier in the book, I also have to laugh when I hear people talk about Korie, Jessica, and me as gold diggers. I think,
Oh please! Jase was skinning raccoons for extra money when Cole (our second child) was born!
The only gold I was interested in was Jason’s old gold-colored Chevy, because it had a bench seat and I could snuggle up to him while he drove.

When
Duck Dynasty
started, we lived paycheck to paycheck. Most of us in the family did not really have anything extra. Jason and I often heard our friends talking about financial planning for their children’s college careers, but that seemed almost impossible to us; we simply hoped our car kept running.

I will never forget the days, not so long ago, when instead of traveling around making live appearances for large audiences on weekends, Jason traveled to small towns to preach in churches and typically brought home some kind of honorarium that provided
us with a little extra money. Financially speaking, we did not have much, but we were happy, and we had a good life. We were blessed before we ever dreamed of being on television. Now we are overwhelmingly blessed. We were blessed to have enough for many years; now we have been blessed with abundance.

G
ENEROSITY
C
OMES FROM THE
H
EART

I have never been affluent; Jase hasn’t either. Spending a lot of money on ourselves and “building barns and bigger barns” is not in our personalities. We have always tried to be generous, and
Duck Dynasty
has not changed that. Now we simply have a little more to be generous with.

I once heard a saying that went something like “If you won’t share a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when you are poor, you won’t share a steak when you are rich.” Generosity comes from the heart, not from your bank account. In 1997, Jase and I built a house in the country. For six years before that, we had lived in a 1,099-square-foot two-bedroom, one-bath house in the middle of town. That was where we brought home our first child, Reed, in 1995. For six years, we hosted Sunday-night church fellowships in our house with anywhere from fifty to eighty people in our carport turned living room. Finally Jase said, “I just can’t live here anymore. I really need to move to the country.”

At that time, Duck Commander was still being run out of Phil and Miss Kay’s house, and Jase was Phil’s only help when it came to making duck calls. Since Phil and Miss Kay lived so far from town,
we decided to try to move closer to them. Phil’s good friend Mac had three acres next to his house and offered it to us for a great price. We built a four-bedroom, two-bath house on that property, where we lived for ten years and brought two more babies home from the hospital.

Since we were on a tight budget, our contractor offered many different ways for us to save money. He said, “Every corner we build is an added expense.” So I said, “Then I want only four corners.”

We made our front bedroom into a playroom with a glass-pane door in order to accommodate the many church groups and Bible studies we planned to have in our home. This way, kids could use that room quietly while the adults watched them during our Bible studies. It worked wondrously, and people could come to the gatherings without having to hire a babysitter.

I learned from watching Phil and Miss Kay what it means to use all of your resources in ways that help others. Jase and I understand that the material blessings we have are gifts from God, not something we earned ourselves. If you think you deserve something or have something because of your own deeds, it will be far more difficult to share it. Living a life of gratefulness and generosity is far more rewarding than counting your silver coins every night.

Now God has blessed us with a platform. The visibility and resources we now have were given to us directly by Him, and we know God has given them to us for a reason. That reason, I believe, is not to please ourselves; it’s to help others. We have a beautiful home and nice vehicles, which we enjoy immensely. But they are only things. They are not nearly as important to us as people and our relationships with them.

W
E
R
ECOGNIZE
O
UR
R
ESPONSIBILITIES

People who watch
Duck Dynasty
do not always realize that we have a family business—not just for television but in real life. We work hard, just like lots of other people in America. For some reason, God has seen fit to use us in the world of entertainment, and we believe He has a purpose and a plan in doing so.

All of us feel that the opportunities and resources we have been given are big responsibilities for the Robertson family as a whole and for each of us individually. This is something God has given us that does not ordinarily happen to many other families, and we want to be good faithful stewards of it. Jase and I talk to our children a lot about the parable of the talents. In Matthew 25:14–30, Jesus told a parable about a man who left on a long journey. Before he left he gave to one servant five talents (a type of money in New Testament times), to another two, and to another one. The one with five talents put his money to work and gained five more. The person with two talents also doubled his money. But the servant to whom he gave one talent buried it. When the man returned, he was very proud of the first two servants but very disappointed in the last one. Because the third servant had not used the talent he’d been given—but had buried it—he took that servant’s only talent away from him. In other words, God gives what He feels we are responsible enough to use, and if we aren’t responsible with it, He will take it away. In our family, we
want to use what He gives us in all the right ways and never misuse it or fail to appreciate it. Will we always make the right decision? Sadly, no. We will make mistakes, misjudgments, and downright selfish decisions sometimes. But thanks to Jesus, we are given many more chances to get things right the next time.

J
UST
R
EGULAR
F
OLKS

Jase and I are very thankful to have our children in a school where teachers, coaches, and classmates treat them the same way they treat everyone else. They definitely don’t get the star treatment, and that’s the way we want it. Our boys have to work just as hard as their peers to make a sports team, and they will get benched as quickly as anyone else if they do not play well. I love that they do not get treated any differently from their fellow students.