Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl

by Jase Robertson

  “Hey, you need to walk around my house,” I told him. “Stay out of my backyard.”

  The guy didn’t respond. A few days later, I came home from work and saw him standing in my backyard. I knew Missy was inside the house, so it really freaked me out seeing him there. I didn’t know if he was a peeping Tom or what. I jumped out of my truck and ran as fast as I could toward him. But when I got close to him, I realized he was a really big kid, probably only sixteen years old.

  “You might whip me if you decide to fight, but you’ll remember this day the rest of your life,” I told him.

  I proceeded to share the Gospel with him in a very stern voice. I told him we were hosting a Bible study later that night, invited him to attend, and encouraged him to bring a Bible if he had one. To my surprise, he actually showed up at our house, but instead of bringing a Bible, he brought a bag of marijuana!

  “If I’m really going to change my life, I guess I need to get rid of this,” he said.

  I thought the guy was trying to entrap me with the police, and I was looking in every direction to see if anyone was watching. I invited him into my house and dumped the weed down our garbage disposal. I found out later that the kid’s father had left him when he was very young, and his mother wasn’t very involved in his life. He’d dropped out of school and wasn’t doing much of anything besides smoking weed and drinking beer. He seemed fascinated with gangs and the type of lifestyle that goes along with them. He used a lot of gangster lingo when he spoke, but the scariest part was that his ultimate goal in life was to become incarcerated in the federal prison system. He figured that was the best way he’d be sure to have three meals a day and a roof over his head. The kid attended a few of our Bible studies, and I became a father figure to him. I persuaded him to go back to school and tried to get him to try out for the football team. I’m pretty sure we helped him change his life.

  One of the strangest moments in my early days of sharing the Gospel occurred when I was introduced to a guy who suffered from Tourette’s syndrome. I didn’t know him, but I could tell he was starting to get anxious as I read him scripture. He also had a stuttering problem and couldn’t put sentences together as he tried to talk to me. All of a sudden, he started shouting four-letter words. I didn’t know the guy had Tourette’s, so I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I feared he might have been demon possessed! The more he blurted out obscenities, the louder I got in sharing the message. It was quite the banter. I was thinking I might have to revisit my thoughts on exorcisms until my buddy told me about his disorder.

  Some of the people I met through happenstance became some of my closest friends. One night, Blake and I were driving to share the Gospel with the guy who owned the auto body shop where I’d traded the deer I ran over for a new (but used) radiator. On the way, Blake saw a guy standing next to a sports car on the side of the road.

  “Hey, I know that guy,” Blake said. “That’s Phillip McMillan.”

  We pulled over and Blake introduced me to Phillip. We invited him to go study the Bible with us.

  “Nah, that’s not for me,” he said.

  “Hey, we’re going to play cards after,” I said. “It’ll be a good time.”

  “I’ll go as long as I don’t get confronted,” he said. “I don’t want to be the center of attention.”

  Well, as soon as we walked into the house, I pulled out my Bible and said to Phillip, “Come over here, son. Let me show you something.”

  Phillip was very moved when he heard the Gospel. It hit him like a ton of bricks. He was very emotional and asked me to share the message with his girlfriend, Alicia. Missy and I met with her a few days later. Although I could sense Alicia was a religious person, she seemed somewhat offended by what I was telling her. As much as I tried, I couldn’t get Alicia to embrace Christ’s message.

  About a month later, there was a knock at my front door at six o’clock in the morning.

  When Missy opened the front door, Alicia was standing there in a driving rainstorm. She had tears in her eyes and was holding a Bible in her hand and told us she had been up all night.

  “I can’t get around it,” she told me.

  “Well, what do you want to do?” I asked her.

  “Will you baptize me?” she said.

  I baptized Alicia, and she and Phillip became two of our closest friends. Although Phillip is very competitive with Willie and me—you might have seen him in our lawn mower race on Duck Dynasty—we’re actually good friends. They embraced the Lord’s message and recommitted themselves to living a pure life.

  I believed God sent all these people to me to hear the message of Jesus. Second Corinthians 5:20 says: “We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” In Christianity, how you finish is as important as how you begin. These new friends had been living such hard lives, and I didn’t want to lose a single one of them. Many of them came from broken homes and were battling alcohol and drug addictions, and some of them were even involved in prostitution. I felt like it was my responsibility to keep them out of trouble, so I became their mentor and entertainer.

  Missy and I hosted three scheduled Bible studies every week. We would always cook and gather around our table for a meal and prayer. We didn’t have much money and most of our meals could be found under the title “Forty Ways to Cook a Potato.” Everyone considered our home a safe house, so we never locked our doors in case someone showed up in the middle of the night needing a place to stay. There was a men’s night, a women’s night, and a Sunday-night house church. Sometimes, we had as many as seventy people crammed into our small house, but it never seemed crowded as we prayed together, sang together, and shared how we could become more like Christ. We also hosted movie nights and all-night card games at our house.

  Eventually, Missy and I sought the advice of several people to help us balance our marriage and ministries. My parents; her parents; Alan and his wife, Lisa; and our friends Mac and Mary Owen were very helpful and offered us spiritual guidance. They helped us gain a perspective on what was best for us that would still allow us to help others. Any couple will tell you that the first year of marriage is the most difficult because you’re still trying to get to know each other. But we were also trying to bring so many people to the Lord in our ministry work.

  No matter what you do in duck hunting, you’re not going to get the ducks every time because there are ultimately too many things out of your control. Hey, just because you’re sitting in a duck blind doesn’t guarantee you’re going to shoot a duck! What I finally came to realize about introducing others to Christ is that Missy and I needed to be a team, and we needed to share the message and stop worrying about when, if, or how people responded, even though it was so exciting when they did. There is a spiritual growth process and ultimately everyone has to find their way in their relationship with Christ. Second Corinthians 4:5 says: “We do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord.”

  There are a lot of ways to encourage people to go to heaven, but you can’t carry them there! There was one man in particular who helped me realize that fact. I tried everything in my power to help this guy for years, even jumping into the middle of a fistfight between him and his wife. But no matter how hard I tried, he didn’t want to surrender to Christ. I’m just a man; only God can change the heart. Second Corinthians 4:7 says: “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.”

  There are similarities in sharing Jesus and duck hunting, even though Christ offers eternal life to humans and hunting results in death for ducks. They both require teamwork. They also require patience and perseverance. You cannot give up when ducks don’t respond to duck calls or people don’t embrace the call to Christ. Keep sharing and keep shooting.

  Hey, I wish I could produce a guaranteed “rainout” when it comes to bringing people closer to Christ. While I do not want anyone to miss out on possibly living forever with God, I have come to reali
ze that the Christian life is a marathon. People grow in their faith at different paces depending on their own circumstances in life. The key is to share, love, and encourage people to put their faith in Christ, and when they don’t respond, we simply offer a place of forgiveness to come back to if or when their heart changes. We do not judge or police those who choose not to accept Christ, but we wish them the best of luck. They’re going to need it.

  One of my favorite things about the church I meet with is their forgiving spirit for those who go forward every Sunday after the message of Christ is preached and express their desire to change their lives’ direction. No one ever responds alone at our church—and a large group of people from the congregation always flocks to the front to join and support them. The response that brings me the most joy is “I’m coming home.”

  9

  MY BOYS

  ESTABLISHING NEW PRIORITIES

  Start a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

  —PROVERBS 22:6

  There are some things in life over which you have absolutely no control. The first such event is your birth. My dad was not present when I was born. He was fishing when my mom went into labor, and she sent Uncle Si to try to persuade Phil to come witness the momentous occasion. His reply was, “What do you want me to do about it?” I guess technically his argument was based on some form of logic. Eventually, he came around and was present when my youngest brother, Jep, was born. Phil described it as a “life-changing event,” even though he said at the time that after viewing the birth he believed his future sex life with my mom was officially over. Even though my dad and I have a lot in common, especially when it comes to hunting and fishing, I decided that watching each of my own kids being born was something I wasn’t going to miss.

  I was at the hospital when my older son, Reed, was born on May 15, 1995. As for my younger son, Cole, the circumstances of his birth were similar to what I’d experienced with my dad, but we’ll get to that story in a minute. Missy and I decided before our wedding that we weren’t going to have any children until after five years of marriage. When you have kids, everything changes, and we wanted to enjoy being together while we were young and lay a spiritual foundation for our family before we had any kids.

  The birth of Reed was so excruciating and painful that I wasn’t sure Missy would ever want to have another child. She was about ten days past her due date and looked like she was ready to pop at any minute. Missy’s doctor asked her to come to the hospital on a Monday morning. The doctor induced her that morning and then didn’t show up again until about three thirty P.M. Nothing major was happening yet, so the doctor broke Missy’s water and left.

  Missy remembers the details of Reed’s birth better than I do.

  Missy: Soon after the doctor broke my water, I started to feel a more consistent pain, but I did breathing exercises and was able to handle it. However, just a few minutes later, my contractions became much harder, my breathing became very labored, and my stomach started convulsing to where I wasn’t able to stay in control. I urged Jase to get the nurse to order the epidural for the pain, which he gladly did. She called the doctor and returned to the room, rolling her eyes at me, which validated my feeling like a wimp. She reported that the doctor said if I was dilated close to four centimeters, I could get the epidural. While the nurse proceeded to check me, I started to pray. I had never prayed so hard for a number in all my life! But then the nurse gasped out loud.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’re at nine centimeters!” the nurse said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means you’re going to have to start pushing,” the nurse said. “It’s too late for an epidural.”

  Missy started crying and told the nurse she’d paid for the epidural and wanted it right then. Unfortunately, it was too late. Reed was positioned faceup in the womb, instead of facedown, and Missy had to push for two hours without any medicine. Let me tell you one thing: my respect for women grew exponentially that day. Like my dad says, if men were left to do the childbearing, there would be a much smaller population on earth. We’d do it once and that’s it! After a couple of hours, the doctors finally gave Missy a local anesthetic and used forceps to pull Reed out. The whole ordeal lasted fourteen grueling hours. When Reed was born, his head was cone shaped because of the forceps. I thought, Well, he’s going to be a little lopsided, but we’ll love him anyway. I didn’t know his head would eventually return to a normal shape.

  Almost two years later, Missy became pregnant with Cole. Because he was breech, a C-section was scheduled for December 11, 1997, which was right in the middle of the duck season split. That’s typically a two-week gap between Thanksgiving and Christmas Day when we can’t hunt ducks in Louisiana. I told her it wasn’t a great idea to have his birthday then because the first couple of weeks in December are usually right in the middle of the split. During the split, we annually hit the road to hunt ducks in Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, or somewhere else. It’s one of the reasons Cole’s birthday is in such a bad spot. I’m usually out of town on his birthday, so we have his party before I leave or after I get back. I told him at an early age, “Sorry, buddy, you came out at a difficult time.” But the good news is I usually take him on a hunting trip for his birthday, now that he’s older.

  Fortunately, the split during the 1997 duck-hunting season occurred a couple of weeks later than it usually does. The day Cole was born, on December 4, 1997, I went duck-hunting with my dad and brothers. During this particular duck season, my dad had noticed an overpopulation of raccoons on his property. I started running traps to manage the problem and make a little extra money. I was getting up at two thirty A.M. to run my traps, and I was catching raccoons, nutria rats, and even a few otters. After checking my traps, I would clean the animals in between shooting volleys in the duck blind. I’d sell both the fur and meat to various customers—nothing went to waste. About ten o’clock that morning, we saw a boat coming toward us. We didn’t recognize the boat, so everybody assumed it was a game warden. It was actually a friend of mine, Chad, whom my mom had called to fetch me from the blind. I was in the middle of cleaning a raccoon and had about two-thirds of its hide off. Both of my hands were covered in blood. Hey, if killing raccoons was illegal—and it isn’t—I would have been caught in the act! Chad stopped about a hundred yards from us.

  “Hey, Jase, your mom called and your wife is having the baby,” he said.

  My dad interjected, “What do you want us to do about it? You’re scaring off the ducks!”

  I looked at the raccoon, looked at my hands, and then looked at Chad.

  “Okay,” I said as I jumped into his pirogue.

  Chad paddled me to the riverbank, where my mom was waiting for me.

  Meanwhile, Missy was terrified that I wouldn’t make it to the hospital in time.

  Missy: Cole wasn’t supposed to be born until a week later, but I went into labor a few hours after Jase left the house to go hunting. I went to the hospital, where I was placed on monitors. Once my doctors and nurses confirmed I was truly in labor, I started to panic because Jase wasn’t anywhere near the hospital.

  I was crying because I couldn’t get ahold of Kay after I called her the first time, but I eventually reached her. After the problems I had with Reed, I did not want to deliver this baby without Jase. I knew I couldn’t do it without him. Well, then the doctors told me they had another C-section scheduled for later that day, and since I was already in labor, they wanted to deliver Cole immediately. I started crying even more after I realized Jason wouldn’t be there. I was in pure panic mode! I couldn’t believe Jason was going to miss it!

  When I reached my truck, I told my mom to let me drive. It usually takes about forty minutes to get from my dad’s property to the hospital. Well, I made it in about fifteen minutes! I had my flashers on and when we reached the hospital parking lot, there was smoke coming out from under the hood. I ran into the operating room wi
thout even washing my hands. When the doctor saw I was covered in blood, she looked at me like, “What have you been doing?” I told her, “I came from skinning a dead raccoon to watching a live human birth.” Amazingly, the doctor never changed facial expressions and told me to wash up.

  Missy: Right after the doctor cut me open, I heard a nurse say, “Guess who’s here?” I didn’t even know if they were talking to me. I had a sheet in front of me, blocking my view, so I couldn’t see anyone. Then they said, “The dad’s here.” I was like, “I don’t want my dad in here!” Once Jason entered the room and I heard his voice, I felt a relief that I can’t even describe. He peeked his head around the sheet and said, “Hey, babe,” like it was just another ordinary day. He started talking to the doctors and nurses and telling them what all he had been doing that morning, and I heard everyone laughing. I started giggling and laughed the entire time because he was hysterical. I literally went from crying to laughing in a matter of seconds, and he put me at ease emotionally. He told everybody the story about skinning the raccoon while they were trying to get the baby out. After a few minutes, I heard my obstetrician say, “Jason, shhhh, I’m getting close to the baby. She can’t laugh anymore, so you’re going to have to stop talking.”

  Cole’s birth happened so fast. This is going to sound strange, but when they cut Missy’s stomach and popped her open, it seemed eerily similar to what I’d left in the duck blind. Some guys can’t handle seeing their wives cut open, but it didn’t bother me at all. But when they pulled Cole out, the umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck two full times. I remember thinking, Uh-oh, my son is in trouble. For some reason, I lost sense of where I was. It was like I was standing over the hood of a car with a bunch of guys trying to fix something. Well, the doctor was the mechanic and seemed to be having difficulties, so I reached in to help her unwrap the cord from my son’s neck. Everybody stopped when I did it, and the doctor looked at me like she was horrified. It was her way of telling me to back away. Thankfully, the doctors removed the cord and Cole was fine.