Good Call: Reflections on Faith, Family, and Fowl

by Jase Robertson

  For me, life has never been about the pursuit of fortune and fame. I’ve never been a materialistic guy and don’t need a lot of money. I think it goes back to my childhood, when we had almost nothing in terms of money or material possessions, but I thought my life was perfect. I was happy living on the river, catching fish, hunting, eating well, and playing dominoes.

  My relationship with my brothers really hasn’t changed much in adulthood. We’re still best friends and go hunting and fishing together as much as we can. Of course, we don’t physically fight anymore; one of us might end up in the hospital if we did. Willie’s my boss, but he learned a long time ago to leave me alone and let me do my job. He knows deep down I take a lot of pride in making the duck calls and ensuring that every one of them sounds perfect. Sure, we have our disagreements from time to time, but he’s still my brother and one of my best friends. I mean, we’re brothers. What’s he going to do, fire me?

  5

  HIGH SCHOOL DAYS

  Becoming an Influencer for Good

  Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

  —MATTHEW 28:19

  In 2008, an Australian company commissioned a study to find out exactly how much people fear public speaking. The survey of more than one thousand people found that 23 percent feared public speaking more than death itself! As Jerry Seinfeld once said, most people attending a funeral would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy!

  I can relate to those people because I feared speaking in front of a class or group of people more than anything else when I was a kid. In fact, I dropped speech in high school because when I signed up for it I thought it was a grammar class for an English credit. When I found out it actually required giving an oral presentation, I didn’t want any part of it! After hearing the overview of the class on the first day, I got out of my seat and walked toward the door; the teacher asked me where I was going. We had a brief meeting in the hall, in which she informed me that nobody ever dropped her class. After a meeting with the principal, I dropped the class, but on the condition that I might be called upon in the near future to use my hunting and fishing skills. I thought the principal was joking—until I was called upon later that year during duck season to pick ducks during recess! I looked at it as a fair trade.

  I believe the circumstances of my childhood set up a perfect path for me to be used by God. At fourteen, I came to understand God’s message, and my baptism in the Ouachita River provided me with a peace about my relationship with Him. But my biggest hurdle in becoming one of God’s disciples was my shy disposition. My personality has always been laid-back, and as I mentioned before, I think my dad’s wild days in my childhood contributed to my becoming introverted. As I became a teenager, I still didn’t say much, and my Christian life was really about trying to avoid doing things that were wrong. As some of my friends began to experiment with sex, drugs, and alcohol, I simply tried to survive as a Christian.

  I remember a summer night after my baptism when a campout with my buddies became very uncomfortable. We had camped out before, but on this night two of the guys brought a couple of beers, a huge marijuana joint, and some nude magazines. I was trying to figure out how I was going to get out of the situation when suddenly we heard people chattering in the woods. It turned out to be my buddy’s youth group from his church on a bit of a surprise visit. There was a mad scramble, and all the evidence was hidden. It felt weird listening to everyone sing around the campfire, thinking of what might have happened. After they left our campsite, I did take a stand and said I wouldn’t be participating in any of the extracurricular activities that were planned. Fortunately, everyone agreed not to as well. However, that became my last campout with those guys, as I was never invited back again.

  Since I decided at an early age that I would avoid the former life of my dad, if for no other reason than the fear of what that life produced, I didn’t experience peer pressure while I was growing up. Sure, I had opportunities to get into trouble with the temptations of alcohol, drugs, and sex, but I decided that those weren’t things I was going to experiment with. My safe havens were hunting in the woods and fishing the river near our house. Because I became such an accomplished fisherman and hunter, I gained the little popularity I needed. I would share my daily hunting and fishing adventures with my buddies at school, but once the conversation turned to immorality I would slip away and move on.

  My parents have always been vocal about “the birds and the bees.” People who watched the Duck Dynasty episode in which my dad gave Willie’s son John Luke and his girlfriend the sex talk while motoring down the river in a boat might not be surprised that I heard this exact speech countless times in my childhood. I remember coming home one day after hearing my buddies talking about sexually transmitted diseases and asking my dad about it. I don’t remember the specifics of his speech, but I would never forget the last thing he said. “Son, you keep that thing in your pocket until you get married and you’ll never have to worry about it,” he told me. The timing of our conversation was perfect when it came to my staying sexually pure.

  The previous year, I had really taken an interest in the opposite sex, but it all seemed pretty natural. It all changed one night when I was in the ninth grade. I went with a buddy to a swimming party, where we met two girls whom we were both interested in. As the night wore on, we found ourselves alone in a room with the girls. The girl I liked asked me to help her undress. I was very attracted to her, and she was pretty healthy for a ninth grader. As I looked back at my buddy cheering me on, the only thing I could think of was my dad’s admonition—and three letters, R-U-N! I ran out of the room, and the abuse I took from my buddies over the next few days was probably the worst I ever experienced. From then on, I decided to shy away from girls with questionable reputations and focus on those who could possibly help me spiritually and help get me to heaven. I didn’t feel I was strong enough to stay pure unless both parties had the same goal.

  I eventually came up with a plan of action. On the first date, I would share my faith with the girl and declare my intention to wait until marriage before having sex. In a way this held me accountable, and it also got rid of any girls who had a quick roll in the hay in mind. I also decided to stay away from “the second look”—noticing a good-looking woman, then dwelling on her for a second, more lustful look. I tried to notice the beauty and feel the attraction to a woman but ultimately pursue her spiritual makeup. It wasn’t always easy and I oftentimes fell short, but I kept trying. God changes us from the inside out, and that helps us look at other people the same way. But it’s hard to break the habit of that second look. So I would think about hunting situations to help me in my struggle. I remember thinking that when it came to dating there was a thin line between becoming a trophy buck hanging out in a woman’s living room for life and being just another dead deer carcass in a ditch run over by a woman driver. Trophy bucks do not come easily, and my pride, which some girls viewed as arrogance, actually helped me stay pure.

  The surprise for me was that my lack of interest in having premarital sex seemed to only fuel girls’ interest in me. I think playing “hard to get” was a sign of strength, and it made me different from most guys. I have to be honest: I did experience a certain thrill from being chased by the other sex. But in the end, my relationships with girls usually ended after the Gospel speech or when I informed them that hunting and fishing were a lot more fun (and important) than having a relationship based on pure physical attraction. My plan was to stick to hunting ducks and frogs and not women.

  As I reached the age of sixteen, I was really battling with being vocal about my faith. My friends seemed so vile, and I knew they probably weren’t mature enough to seriously consider what I wanted to tell them. I wanted to share what I was doing and what I believed with my friends, but I didn’t have the courage to do it. I believed that if my friends knew what I knew, they wouldn’t be doing what
they were doing. I was studying the Bible and read Philemon 1:6: “I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith, so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ.”

  At some point in high school, I finally realized that being indwelled by the Holy Spirit and having God with me were not things I needed to be shy about. As I matured and became more confident, and as my family’s spiritual growth continued, I started to spread God’s message more and more. Somewhere in this process, I stumbled upon the greatest way to keep myself free from drugs, alcohol abuse, and premarital sex, and it wasn’t about just saying no. Second Corinthians 1:18–20 says that our message is not about saying yes and no, but in Christ it is always yes. The more often you give someone the reasons to say yes to Christ, the less you find yourself having to say no. By becoming the aggressor in sharing the good news of Christ with everyone in earshot, I became the one doing the influencing for good rather than the one being influenced for evil. I deduced that my Christianity is not about me but about Christ living through me. Jesus Christ represents everything that is truly good about me.

  Oddly enough, it started with a prank telephone call when I was seventeen.

  As I was studying the Bible one night, I had just said a prayer in which I asked God for the strength to be more vocal about my faith. All of a sudden, the phone rang and I answered.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  No one answered.

  “Hello?” I asked again.

  There was still silence on the other end. I started to hang up the phone, but then it hit me.

  “I’m glad you called,” I said. “You’re just the person I’m looking for.”

  Much to my surprise, the person on the other end didn’t hang up.

  “I want to share something with you that I’m really excited about,” I said. “It’s what I put my faith in. You’re the perfect person to hear it.”

  So then I started sharing the Gospel, and whoever was on the other end never said a word. Every few minutes, I’d hear a little sound, so I knew the person was still listening. After several minutes, I told the person, “I’m going to ask you a few questions. Why don’t you do one beep for no and two beeps for yes? We can play that game.” The person on the other end didn’t say anything.

  Undaunted by the person’s silence, I took out my Bible and started reading scripture. After a few minutes, I heard pages rustling on the other end of the phone. I knew the person was reading along with me! After a while, every noise I heard got me more excited! At one point, I heard a baby crying in the background. I guessed that the person on the phone was a mother or perhaps a babysitter. I asked her if she needed to go care for her child. She set the phone down and came back a few minutes later. I figured that once I started preaching, she would hang up the phone. But the fact that she didn’t got my adrenaline flowing. For three consecutive hours, I shared the message of God I’d heard from my little church in Luna, Louisiana, and what I’d learned by studying the Bible and listening to others talk about their faith over the last two years. By the time our telephone call ended, I was out of material!

  “Hey, will you call back tomorrow night?” I asked her.

  She didn’t say anything and hung up the phone. I wasn’t sure she would call me back the next night. But I hoped she would, and I prepared for what I was going to share with her next. I came across a medical account of Jesus’ death and decided to use it. It was a very graphic account of Jesus dying on a cross.

  Around ten o’clock the next night, the phone rang. I answered it and there was silence on the other end. My blood and adrenaline started pumping once again! Our second conversation didn’t last as long because I came out firing bullets! I worried my account of Jesus’ death was too graphic and might offend her. But as I told her the story of Jesus’ crucifixion—how He was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, beaten with leather-thonged whips, required to strip naked, forced to wear a crown of thorns on His head, and then crucified with nails staked through His wrists and ankles—I started to hear sobs on the other end of the phone. Then I heard her cry and she hung up the phone. She never called back.

  Although I never talked to the woman again or learned her identity, my conversations with her empowered me to share the Lord’s message with my friends and even strangers. I came to truly realize it was not about me but about the power in the message of Christ. When I attended a football game at West Monroe High School with a few buddies the next fall, a few of them started giving me grief about my faith in Christ. After a few good minutes of ribbing, I looked at Blake Gaston, my best friend, and asked him three questions.

  “How did you get on earth? What are you supposed to be doing here? How are you leaving?” I asked him.

  None of my friends could offer me good answers at the time. One of them said he came from his momma, and a few others cracked crude jokes. Blake informed me he had a date with a flaming-hot redhead later that night, and there was no way he was going to miss out on possibly getting physical with her. We went our separate ways. They believed I was a Bible-thumping radical, and I wasn’t interested in participating in what they were doing. I went home that night and made a list of about a hundred friends I wanted to share the Gospel with.

  Over the next two years, I went back to every one of my friends who’d ridiculed me at the football game, sat down with each of them face-to-face, and told them about my faith. My family and I ended up baptizing most of them in the river by our house. A lot of those guys are still my best friends and attend our church today. The first one I actually brought to the Lord was Blake. He called me a couple years after our confrontation and asked if he could come fishing with me. I had never burned the bridge of our relationship, and eventually I had asked him to be a groomsman in my wedding. I knew his heart was troubled and the redhead he had been so enamored with was long gone. He spent the next few days with me at my house, and we talked about his past, and he listened intently to the good news of Christ. He claimed Christ as Lord, took the same walk to the Ouachita River I had, and was baptized into Christ.

  Because of my strong faith, I didn’t have a lot of good friends in school. In fact, I only had one very close friend who was also outspoken about her faith. Her name was Angel Gist, and I met her in the ninth grade. She was very vocal about her faith, and that’s one of the things that really drew me to her. We were never more than close friends. When I first started dating Missy, we broke up for a short time because another guy asked her out. I didn’t know why Missy was talking to him in the first place, so we got into an argument and broke up. I went to Angel’s house and sat in her driveway. I wondered if Angel was the woman I needed to be with romantically because of her spirituality. I prayed about it and decided we only needed to be friends.

  But Angel and I were best friends for a couple of years. She had a great personality and an incredible sense of humor. We had a lot of fun together, and even though she was very moral, most people viewed her as hysterically funny and cool to be around. She was fearless regarding what anyone thought about her, and her conversations conveyed that. She had so much self-confidence. We studied the Bible together and played basketball at her house. She was the only girl who ever could whip me in basketball.

  After high school, Angel received a basketball scholarship to attend Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She started as a freshman and had a really bright future. We had somewhat drifted apart because of the paths of our lives. On February 11, 1989, Angel and one of her classmates at Baylor were killed in a car wreck outside of Dawson, Texas. Their car crossed into the eastbound lane of the highway and struck a pickup truck head-on. Angel and her friend died at the scene. Angel was nineteen.

  On the day Angel died, I was with my brothers in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, watching LSU play the University of Tennessee in a basketball game. Somebody called one of my brothers and told him about the accident. My brothers didn’t tell me Angel died until we returned to West Monroe a few days later. We were about a mile from m
y house when my older brother, Al, told me what had happened. I was overcome with emotion and wept bitterly and uncontrollably. It was the only time in my life that I stayed angry with my brothers for an extended period of time. I went to Angel’s funeral but couldn’t stomach going inside. I later found out her parents wanted me to serve as a pallbearer. I think it might have helped me because I don’t think I ever grieved for her properly.

  It was a really difficult time in my life because Angel was the most spiritual person I knew on earth. She was like a sister to me, and I visited her burial plot many times alone, trying to cope with her being gone. I couldn’t make sense of her death, and it took me a few years to get past it. She was such an influential person in my life, and I realized after she was gone how much I loved her. The only positive I took from her death was that the resurrection became more of a reality for me. Angel provided me with a living example of being vocal about one’s faith. I knew I wanted to see her again. I read Hebrews 12:1, which tell us, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.” I added Angel to my list of witnesses, and I know I’ll see her again.

  During my senior year of high school, Tommy Powell, one of my dad’s closest friends, asked me to speak to a group of students at a small Christian school in West Monroe. Tommy hunted with us a lot, and he kind of took me under his wing and offered me advice about a lot of life’s lessons. The thing I really liked about Tommy was that he was always so positive. Every time Tommy went hunting with us, he was the most optimistic hunter I have ever shared a blind with. I guess Tommy saw potential in me from a spiritual standpoint. More than anything else, I think he realized I was serious about my faith. Tommy isn’t a dynamic guy by any stretch of the imagination, but I think in the Lord you try to find ways to help people out. I think mentoring me was his opportunity to help someone.