Growing Up Duggar: It's All About Relationships

by Duggar, Jill

  Thank you for downloading this Howard Books eBook.

  * * *

  Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Howard Books and Simon & Schuster.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  or visit us online to sign up at

  eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

  CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  GREETINGS

  From Our Hearts to Yours

  1. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF

  Getting to know and love the girl in the mirror

  2. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR PARENTS

  Love, respect, and communication

  3. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR SIBLINGS

  Becoming best friends

  4. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH FRIENDS

  “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future”

  5. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GUYS

  Saving yourself for the one God has for you

  6. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH CULTURE

  Making choices that will keep you pure

  7. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR COUNTRY

  Making a difference in the political arena

  8. YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE WORLD

  Developing a servant’s heart

  A FINAL WORD

  Catch the Spark

  About Jana, Jill, Jessa, and Jinger Duggar

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WE ARE SO GRATEFUL to all of the following people who have invested their time and energy to make this book a reality:

  Charlie Richards, who asked us older girls a lot of questions one day about how our parents have raised us, then insisted that we document our answers in a book to help young ladies and their parents. Charlie also spent a lot of time with us helping us type up and articulate our life experiences to illustrate the principles we live by.

  Priscilla and David Waller (Anna Duggar’s sister and brother-in-law), who were instrumental in interjecting illustrations and principles that would connect young ladies with practical tips they could apply to everyday life. Anna and Priscilla grew up helping their dad with a prison ministry and have hearts to help young people make right decisions in their lives.

  Philis Boultinghouse, with Simon and Schuster, who encouraged us along the way, helped in editing, and was so patient with us throughout this two-year project.

  Eileen O’Neill, president of Discovery Communications, who found our family in a Parents magazine article ten years ago and asked Bill Hayes and Kirk Streb with Figure 8 Films to contact us about filming our first one-hour documentary. You have enabled us to share our story and God’s love with people around the world!

  Sue Ann Jones, who received our manuscript while it was still pretty rough and helped us miraculously transform it into what it is. Thank you for your months’ worth of work. You did a great job!

  Leslie Nunn Reed, our book agent, who contacted our parents several years ago and encouraged them to write down their life story in book form. Because of your vision for our family to share the Bible principles we live by, we have received thousands of e-mails from individuals saying their marriages have been strengthened, relationships with their children have improved, and many families have developed more of a spiritual focus in life.

  And to our parents, we love you more than words can say. Thank you for all the sacrifices you have made to have us, provide for us, and point us to a relationship with Jesus. You have guided us through many seas of emotion, encouraging us to trust the Lord no matter what. You are the best parents in the world! You have shown each one of us nineteen kids special love and attention and have spent more time with us individually than many parents do with only one or two children. Thank you for modeling Christ-like living to us and for opening the doors of our home to be a testimony to the world!

  Most important, we want to praise our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. “Soli Deo Gloria!” To God alone be the glory.

  Jana, Jill, Jessa & Jinger Duggar

  “. . . the eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.”

  1 Corinthians 2:9

  We are so grateful to God for each one of our family members. Here you see us all together in front of an old house, holding our favorite instruments.

  GREETINGS

  From Our Hearts to Yours

  “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you,” saith the LORD, “thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”

  —Jeremiah 29:11

  WE’VE WRITTEN THIS BOOK to have the conversation we wish we could have with each of you one-on-one. The conversation that may have begun with a letter or an e-mail you wrote to us, or the one that started with a question you asked or a comment you made after we spoke to a group somewhere.

  Maybe you’re that girl we met in the locked ward—we still call it the cage—in the orphanage in Central America. Jana sat with you there and shared your hope that someday you would see your mother again.

  Maybe you’re the single mom whose baby Jill helped deliver as an apprentice midwife. You smiled and nodded when Jill asked if it would be okay if she said a prayer for your newborn babe.

  You might be the mom who approached Jessa after we spoke at a women’s conference somewhere. You asked for ideas about how you could be more helpful and encouraging to your teenage daughter as she struggles with relationships involving boys.

  Or perhaps you’re the girl Jinger met while she was ministering at the juvenile detention center. You could hardly bring yourself to believe God could really forgive you. But Jinger assured you He can. And will.

  Maybe you’ve never met or contacted us at all, but you’ve seen our family’s show on television, and you’re curious.

  Whoever you are—whether you’re the girl we met who goes to a Christian school and attends church three times a week but is still struggling inside, or the girl with five tattoos and multiple piercings, the one whose parents sent you to the Christian girls retreat Jana works at, hoping you could be “fixed” there—we’ve written this book to continue the conversation we started with you but couldn’t finish because time ran out and we had to go our separate ways. And we’ve written this book because the volume of letters and e-mails that come to us is more than we can manage individually and because we know how it feels to be curious about something.

  We know how weird we must seem to a lot of you, with our different style of dressing and our conservative Christian beliefs. We know it’s unusual to be part of a family with nineteen children—one that’s featured on reality TV not for the outrageous things we do or say but for the adventures a family the size of ours can have doing ordinary activities.

  And we’re curious about you, too. We’d like to know how we can impact your life for good. Even though we have never met most of you reading this book, we want you to know we love you and care about your future. We want to share our stories with you, knowing you have a story, too, and hoping something we say here might empower you to use your story, your life, to help others.

  RACING AGAINST TIME

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO, BEFORE anyone outside our circle of friends and family had ever heard of the Duggars, our parents prayed, “Lord, we pray that our family can impact the world for You!”

  Mom and Dad look at life as a race against time. When they prayed that prayer, they were humbly asking God to keep each member of our family on the right track so that we might fulfill the purpose for which He created us, and that He would accomp
lish as much through us as possible during our time on earth.

  At that point, they probably would have been happy if even a single person had become a follower of Jesus because of them. They couldn’t have imagined that instead we would be welcomed into millions of homes each week through television (which our family doesn’t even watch!). The way that happened is told in their two books, The Duggars: 20 and Counting and A Love That Multiplies.

  Along with our brothers and sisters, we’ve grown up in the public spotlight (or as we describe it, living in a fishbowl). Now, as adults, we four oldest girls (Jana, twenty-four; Jill, twenty-two; Jessa, twenty-one; and Jinger, twenty) are humbled by the opportunity we’ve been given to reach out to other girls and young women to share the blessings and lessons we’ve experienced as we’ve tried to follow the Christ-like way of life we have seen modeled by our parents.

  We’ve written this book as a way to answer some of the questions we receive in e-mails and letters every day.

  Because so many people, especially girls and young women like ourselves, have expressed such curiosity about the way our family works, and because it’s just not possible to answer each question individually, we’ve written this book to tell you about our journey to adulthood, our goals and our faith—and how it all comes together in the work we’ve chosen to do.

  MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN YOUR RELATIONSHIPS

  WE DON’T HAVE A perfect family, and we’re far from perfect ourselves, but all our lives our parents have encouraged us Duggar kids to have a daily goal of maintaining and strengthening our closest relationships. Those relationships begin with the way we feel about ourselves, accepting the way God created us and seeking His purpose for our lives.

  Then we focus on the way we relate to our parents. Our parents have always worked hard to make their relationship with us a priority. They’ve established family traditions and practices that involve cultivating character and motivating us to maximize our life purpose. And on practical terms, they encourage us to talk with them about not only the small things in life but also deep matters of the heart.

  Next, Mom and Dad encourage us kids to be best friends with each other, and so we talk about our relationships with siblings. Throughout our growing-up years Mom and Dad have taught us the importance of maintaining these close relationships, and step by step, they’ve guided us in how to get along, even though each of us girls now has eighteen siblings—including ten brothers! Of course, as happens in any family, conflicts occur, annoyances are inevitable, and hurt feelings spring up. But Mom and Dad have always taught us to quickly work out those issues so that resentment and bitterness don’t creep in and destroy our family’s closeness and unity.

  Then, we take many of the lessons about getting along with our siblings and apply them to our relationships with friends. Mom and Dad have taught us the value of choosing our friends carefully and staying true to our own convictions if our friends’ behaviors and beliefs veer away from ours.

  And then there’s the really hot topic we’re asked about a lot: boys. That’s a relationship that is frequently considered by just about every girl we know—including the four oldest Duggar girls! As we write this, we’re waiting for the young man God has for us—if marriage is in the future He plans for us. Meanwhile, we’ve thought a lot about what we want in a future husband and how we anticipate courtship will happen. As you might expect, it’s pretty different from the way many couples interact these days. For one thing, it may surprise you to know it doesn’t involve typical dating, but what we call courtship—or “dating with a purpose.”

  Beyond our relationships with ourselves, our parents, our siblings, our friends, and boys, we also discuss our relationships with our culture, our country, and the world at large. As Christians, we believe that we are to be “in” the world but not “of” the world, as the Bible says; so we talk about how we relate to the Internet, movies, entertainment, and music. Then we’ll share our passion for being involved in the political realm and how we want to make a difference there, as well as our commitment and desire to reach out to people in faraway countries, showing Jesus’s love to people we don’t even know. The Bible teaches us to put others’ needs above our own and to treat other people the way we want to be treated. We call it having a ministry mind-set, and it’s something that’s stressed in the Duggar home. We’ll tell you how that emphasis has led us to pursue the work we’re doing now.

  Though the topics and stories will vary from chapter to chapter, the theme of this whole book is relationships; and the foundation for all our relationships with people—as well as our relationship with our culture, country, and the world—is our relationship with God. We don’t have a separate chapter on our relationship with God, but our message about that is woven throughout every chapter and topic of the book. We hope that as you read this book, you’ll gain a clear understanding of how everything we do is rooted in our faith in Him.

  You’ll see that the length of the chapters in this book varies a bit—but every chapter is divided into short, easy-to-read segments. You can read as much or as little at one sitting as you like—whatever works for you. We have written this book with you in mind.

  Most important, we hope this book will inspire you to let the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ empower you to make a difference through the relationships that fill your own life.

  We may have met some of you when we were speaking (and laughing) at a conference somewhere.

  1

  YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF

  Getting to know and love the girl in the mirror

  I will praise Thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

  —Psalms 139:14

  WHEN OUR PARENTS WERE planning to build our current house in northwest Arkansas, they asked us kids how many bedrooms we thought the house should have. It was an easy question for us to answer: we wanted to be together. So, upstairs in our house today, there’s one big room for all the girls, one big room for all the boys, and our parents’ bedroom with an adjoining nursery.

  Jana and I (Jill) sleep in double beds with our youngest sisters, Jordyn and Josie, and the other girls sleep in twin- or youth-sized beds. It’s always an exciting time when the littlest sister gets to move from the nursery to the “big girls’ room” with us, although they’re always free to toddle back to Mom and Dad’s room if they need to. We love the late-night conversations and falling asleep each night surrounded by our sisters.

  One night a few years ago as I was putting my retainer in my mouth at bedtime, my sister Johannah, then probably five or six, asked what it was. I told her it was something I slept with to help keep my teeth aligned now that I didn’t have to wear braces anymore.

  “Can I wear it?” Johannah asked.

  We Duggars do love to share a lot of things but, thankfully, dental appliances aren’t among them. I smiled and told her no, it was made just for me and it wouldn’t fit her mouth at all.

  Thinking about that conversation later reminded me that we can’t conform ourselves to other people’s molds. But we try sometimes, don’t we? It’s inevitable that human beings, particularly teenagers and especially teenage girls, go through times when they may try to remake themselves into something, or someone, they’re not. Every girl has a tendency to compare herself to other girls, noticing how they dress or style their hair, how much they weigh, how they talk, the words and phrases they use, and how guys respond to them.

  You may think that kids like the Duggars, who are homeschooled and don’t watch TV or read secular magazines, are immune from feelings like that, but we’re not! We’ve experienced some of those same negative feelings about the girl in the mirror that you may be feeling right now or have felt in the past.

  Jinger didn’t seem to mind when we visited a dude ranch and deputies Jessa, left, and Jill took her into custody.

  All of us have gone through times when we’ve felt we needed to lose weight. And we’ve all looked at the girl in the mirror and sometimes found things th
at just didn’t seem to measure up.

  Are you going through a time in your life when you’re being critical of the girl in your mirror?

  ACCEPTING THE GIRL IN THE MIRROR

  THAT’S HARD, ISN’T IT? You’ve looked at that girl in the mirror all your life and had made friends with her, and then one day you look at her and notice the blemish on her forehead or the nose that isn’t as cute as your friend’s nose. Maybe the girl who seemed just fine yesterday now seems too short or too tall, too thin or too heavy. Maybe her clothes, the ones that were your favorites yesterday, seem completely wrong today. And that hair. It’s ridiculous!

  Suddenly the girl who looked just fine yesterday seems like a total loser today compared to those cute girls at the mall . . . or your school . . . or your homeschool group . . . or even your church.

  So then what happens? You reject that girl in the mirror, and in your heart you worry that she’ll be rejected by others, too, including those you admire. Fear of rejection is one of the major problems facing teenagers and young adults today. It affects almost all of us, including the Duggar kids, at one time or another.

  For example, I (Jill) can remember a Sunday morning when we were getting ready for church and I went through multiple outfit changes because I was trying to measure up. The night before, I had stood in our closet for at least ten minutes trying to decide what I would wear the next day. (Ever been there?)

  Finally I chose an outfit I thought was suitable. I took it upstairs and laid it out so it would be ready the next morning. But when I walked out of the bathroom Sunday morning, dressed and ready to go, I noticed how great Jessa looked wearing an adorable outfit she had recently found at a thrift store. Plus, she had the cutest aviator sunglasses perched on her head and a stylish leather bag slung over her shoulder. Suddenly the outfit I had chosen for myself the night before seemed totally wrong. I wanted to look as cute as Jessa did.