26 
26 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.
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.
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.
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.
My parents, along with four other couples, founded Ouachita Christian School in 1974, so in a way it feels like home to me. Korie, Jep, and I all went to school there, and Phil taught there for a while before he started Duck Commander. Now all the Robertson cousins go there. It’s a school founded on Christian principles, and Jase and I know it is a place that affirms the values we have for our family. Everyone there treats us as though we are regular moms and dads—which, of course, we are—so we appreciate that. We can attend Reed’s home football games and sit right there in the stands with the other fans and families, and no one bothers us. Even on the road at away games, our friends help keep us as anonymous as possible so we can enjoy being just parents. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. We try to accommodate as many autograph and picture requests as possible before and after those games and during halftime. But when Reed steps onto the field, we are there in full support of him and his teammates, and autographs have to wait.
One thing that really surprised me, and probably our whole family, after our show started was that people we did not even know came to our church to try to see us or to ask for autographs. I have sung on our church’s praise team almost every Sunday for more than twenty-two years, and I love doing it. One Sunday after a very prayerful song, someone yelled from the audience, “Go, Missy!” I turned three shades of red, I’m sure. As our praise leader went right into the next song, a couple of men made their way over to where that person was sitting in order to defuse any potential problems. Nothing else happened, but obviously, the somber moment was lost, and the mood became very awkward and a bit tense.
We appreciate the interest in our family, but being able to attend services without distractions is important to us. We go to church to worship God and for fellowship with our longtime friends—people who knew us and loved us before our faces were ever seen on TV. We hope everyone who visits our church is blessed by being there, and we really appreciate all the people who respect us and respect our church family by allowing us to attend church uninterrupted.
We know this is only a season in our lives. It will not always be like this. One day, maybe sooner than we think, we will go back to being regular church members in a regular church on a regular Sunday morning. We might even miss being asked to take a picture during “meet and greet.” Well, maybe “miss” is too strong of a word. Our church family is very special. Our services are incredible and our a cappella singing is inspiringly beautiful. People are completely uplifted when they visit our congregation, and it honestly has nothing to do with us. We are no more important than anyone else there. Every member makes it special. That’s what is so great about God’s family. Every part has a purpose—television star or not.