Happy, Happy, Happy (27 page)

The man who wrote me the letter was baptized and saved, but he went down kicking and screaming. Most of the other people we’ve converted over the years have accepted Jesus Christ as their savior more willingly. For about twenty years, we had Bible study at our house on a weekday night and house
church on Sunday nights. One time, Jep and his best friend, Trey Fisher, brought eighteen teenagers to the house, and we baptized every one of them that night in the river.

We were never really sure what we’d find on the riverbank when we walked down for a baptism. One night, we took about twenty people down to the river to take their confessions and baptize them. About the time we were ready to walk into the water, a couple of rednecks pulled up in their boat. It was obvious they’d had a couple of beers to drink.

“What the hell is going on around here?” one of them yelled.

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “We just preached the gospel to these people, and we’re gonna baptize ’em right here. You all want in on the action?”

I ain’t never seen a motor crank up that fast and leave!

Our dogs always seemed to follow the crowd to the river for baptisms. I was baptizing a young man one time, and just as soon as I pulled him out of the water, the dogs started fighting for some reason. Without skipping a beat, I told the young man he must have had an evil spirit in him, which God had miraculously transferred to the dogs! There were about ten dogs squealing and barking, and I told him the dogs were going to fight the demon out of them! The funny part is everyone on the riverbank thought I was telling the truth!

We conducted another baptism at our house one night
when the river was really high, which brings water up close to our house, along with the snakes, alligators, and other dangerous debris. My boys went out with flashlights and shotguns to clear our path; they were always on sentinel duty when we baptized someone at night. In fact, during a baptism one very dark night, I accidentally stepped off the normal path and led us into an alligator or turtle bed, and we both disappeared into the water. I like to think that baptism was a twofer!

A lot of the people we’ve converted over the years have become our very close friends and some of them were even married in our front yard. We’ve probably conducted a dozen weddings at our house, with Alan officiating most of them. Paul Lewis was Willie’s best friend growing up. Paul received a full scholarship to play basketball at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond. He even played against Shaquille O’Neal one time and seemed to have a very bright future. But in 1995, Paul was arrested for transporting drugs in Texas and was sentenced to fourteen years in federal prison. He ended up serving twelve and a half years, which was a hard lesson to learn, and Willie was at the prison to pick him up the day he was released.

Willie gave Paul a job at Duck Commander, where he met his future wife, Crystle, a former Texas police officer. They both rededicated their lives to Jesus Christ and were married in our front yard. Paul is African-American; Crystle’s mother is Hispanic
and her father is black. So the wedding crowd consisted of African-Americans and Hispanics but mostly white, bearded rednecks. About the time the wedding proceedings were starting, a friend of mine was putting his boat into the river at our boat dock. My friend later told me he realized then that there must be a God, because every other time he had seen so many ethnicities together, there was usually fighting involved! But there, under the towering pines and oaks next to Cypress Creek in our front yard, he saw a lot of people from different backgrounds who seemed to genuinely love each other and were enjoying being around each other. It was a perfect picture of what Christ’s body should look like on Earth. My family and I are proud to create scenes like that one as a witness to what we believe.

Whenever I think of all the people we’ve baptized over the years, I always recall a conversation Jep had with one of his buddies in the backseat of our car when he was really young. Jep’s friend Harvey asked him what it meant to be a Christian.

“Well, when you get to be about thirteen or fourteen years old, my daddy will sit you down and study the Bible with you,” Jep told him. “He’ll make sure you know what he’s talking about. And then he’ll tell you that Jesus is going to be your Lord and when that happens, you can’t act bad anymore. My daddy will ask you if you want Jesus to be your Lord. If you say yes, we’re all going down to the river. We’ll be so excited that we’ll be skipping
down there. My daddy will put you under the water, but he won’t drown you. He’ll bring you back up and everybody will be clapping and smiling. That’s what he’ll do.”

Nowadays, you don’t see many families—the husband, wife, and children—that are so evangelistic. I think it’s pretty rare in today’s world. The thing that pleases me most about my sons is that no one ever told them to do it. They just decided to be that way. Maybe it was handed down when they heard me telling Bible stories and saw me baptizing people in the river. I didn’t have Jesus in my life until I was twenty-eight. But during the last thirty-eight years of my life, I’ve been telling everyone I meet about him. It was a big change for me. I was converting people to Christianity even before I started making duck calls. Then came the business, the blessing, and the fame, but I’ve stayed the same throughout. Everywhere my sons and I go, we’re telling people the good news about Jesus, blowing duck calls, and making people happy, happy, happy—then down the road we go.

“My daddy will put you under the water, but he won’t drown you.”

Rule No. 14 for Living Happy, Happy, Happy

Read the Bible (We Can Still Save This Once-Great Country—It’s Not Too Late)

A
fter I became a Christian, one of the first changes I made in my life was to take a more active interest in politics and how our government works. I’d never voted until I was twenty-nine, but I decided I ought to do so in order to help put godly men and women in positions of authority—instead of a bunch of heathens—since God works through people.

After studying several political parties to find out what they believe and stand for, I decided my political ideology was more in line with the Republicans. I definitely was no Democrat—that’s for sure—but I don’t really consider myself one or the other. I’m more of a Christocrat, someone who honors our founding fathers and pays them homage for being godly men at a time when wickedness was all over the world. Our founding fathers started this
country and built it on God and His Word, and this country sure would be a better place to live and raise our children if we still followed their ideals and beliefs.

I’m worried about the United States of America, there’s no question about it. There’s wickedness all over our country. America is a country without morals and principles, and it’s a far cry from the great nation our founding fathers created in 1776. Great men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence and whom you see on our money today, agreed that God and the Bible would be their moral compasses for constructing the greatest nation on Earth. But now we’ve taken the Bible out of schools, we’ve taken the Ten Commandments out of courtrooms, and stores like Walmart aren’t even allowed to publicize Christmas anymore! What kind of country are we living in nowadays?

It really seems pretty simple to me. We’re in the year
A.D
. 2013 We’ve been counting time by Jesus for more than two thousand years. He must have done something right! In his Thanksgiving Proclamation in New York on October 3, 1789, Washington, the very first president of the United States, said, “Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and experience.” I’m with George Washington. It was Jefferson, our third president, who said, “All
men are created equal.” Man didn’t crawl out of the ocean like some of these evolutionists would like us to believe; Jefferson believed men were
created
equal. He also said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Those are God-given rights, folks. I’m with Thomas Jefferson.

Sure, our founding fathers weren’t perfect, and they made mistakes along the way. They allowed slavery to take place in our country for close to a hundred years and didn’t allow women to vote in the beginning, but we as a people atoned for our mistakes and corrected them. The difference between our founding fathers and the cats that are ruining our country today is that men like Washington and Jefferson created the greatest country on Earth and these modern-day politicians didn’t!

In a letter to several governors of the first states, Washington wrote, “I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection.” There it is; is that the last time you heard one of our politicians offer a meaningful prayer to God Almighty? The only thing today’s politicians want to talk about is separation of church and state, but our founding fathers wholly embraced their Creator.

Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, could speak ten languages and was studying French,
Latin, and Greek when he was nine. When John F. Kennedy, our thirty-fifth president, brought together the Nobel Prize winners at the White House in 1962, he told them, “Ladies and gentlemen, I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” That’s how much respect and admiration JFK had for Jefferson. And why wouldn’t he? Jefferson authorized the Louisiana Purchase from the French and it turned out to be a pretty good deal!

Jefferson was a smart cat, and his fears about America’s future are sadly coming to fruition. Jefferson once famously said, “To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” Jefferson warned us that socialism would ruin the American democracy, and look what’s happening in our country now. Today, our government is saying the democracy will thrive if you take from those who are willing to work and give to those who aren’t. I have to pay more taxes so that everything can be free for those people who don’t want to work? It’s nonsense. Our government
is doing exactly what Jefferson warned us against. So the question is, who is right? I think Jefferson was on the right side.

Jefferson also said, “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts as it goes. A principle which if acted on would save one half the wars of the world.” What is our national debt now? More than $16 trillion, and it’s climbing every minute with no debt ceiling in sight. We made a grave mistake and didn’t pay our debts as a country as we moved forward. Once you don’t pay, you dig a never-ending hole like the one we have now. Look at the financial disaster we’re leaving our future generations. Our children and grandchildren are going to be saddled with debt up to their eyeballs! My reading of history has convinced me that most bad government comes from too much government. Ronald Reagan, our fortieth president, once famously said, “As government expands, liberty contracts.” Right again!