From Hollywood Fame to Finding Faith | Actor Kirk Cameron

And so the same difficult challenges and influences of Hollywood that turn some people sour is the same pressure that actually softened my heart. My name is Kirk Cameron, and this is my story. I was born in Los Angeles, California, and when I was about nine years old, my mom took the advice of a friend who said, my son's working on a TV show. You should take your kids to go meet this agent and see if they could get into the entertainment biz. And the routine was the same, and I hated it. I couldn't drive, so my mom would pick me up from junior high school, and she had a freshly pressed shirt with a collar and a hairbrush, and I'd slink into the car when my friends weren't looking, and she'd brush my hair, and I would just sleep in traffic on the 101 and 405 to make it to Culver City where I would audition for something. And it was just miserable. When I got the part on Growing Pains, it was actually a miracle that I got the part because I was 14 years old, and we were late for the audition. She said, I drove an hour and a half in traffic, you're going to run in there, and you're going to pound on the door and beg them to audition. So I did. They let me in, and I got the part. And that's how I got the role of Mike Seaver on Growing Pains. And it became really, really popular. And by the time we were into our third season, it was at its apex, and we were in the top 10 of all shows. And that was a big deal then because we didn't have cable and satellite where you have 500 channels or 1,000 channels and the internet. You basically had three channels. You had ABC, NBC, CBS, and we were one of the main shows. And so you had millions and millions of people watching. And people would be walking down the street in New York City, and the guy driving the garbage truck down Third Avenue would be like, hey, Mikey! How's Ben? How's Carol? I'll be like, this is really cool. The one friend that I had when I was on Growing Pains that was inside the industry, and we weren't really close, but it was just kind of fun to have him as a friend, was Michael J. Fox. And one day, Michael J. Fox rolled up in his Ferrari, his red Ferrari, to our little backstage schoolhouse, which was just this little tiny trailer. Think of a little Airstream that could fit like four people. And Fox rolls up, and I get out, and he says, hop in. And we go for this joyride around Warner Brothers Studios. And I'll never forget when we pulled up to a stoplight. I looked over, and there were a couple of teenage girls in a car next to us. And you could just see that they kind of turned and looked. And what they saw was Michael J. Fox and Mike Seaver in a Ferrari. And they just, like, they died. And he just hit the gas and peeled out. And I just thought, like, I'm living a movie. This is like Ferris Bueller's Day Off or something. This is the greatest thing ever. And I look back now, and I say, wow, what a crazy childhood I had. What a crazy growing up experience. Because things could have gone so much differently for me than they did. So my journey toward faith in God is really interesting to me, because I didn't have any faith at all. When I was a kid, I would have called myself an atheist up until I was about 17 years old. And I remember sitting one day in my sports car. I dropped this girl off at an acting class. And I was parked on the side of the road. And I got thinking about the fact that one day I would die and find out if there really is a heaven and a hell, if there really is a creator or there's just nothing. And I knew that if there was a heaven, I wouldn't be going there because of my attitude, my self-centered, conceited, I'm all that. I'm the goat celebrity Mike Seaver guy. And I thought I would humble myself and pray for the first time. And I just closed my eyes. I didn't know why I closed my eyes, but I just saw people in church do that. So I figured maybe it was that extra little something that just made the prayers go up all the way to heaven. And I just said, God, if you're there, would you please show me? I want to know. And if you paint the sunsets in the sky at night, and if you are the one who designs little children and all the beautiful things I see in the world, and I'd like to know the answer to some of the tough questions. And would you forgive me for the wrong things I've done and make me the person that you want me to be? And I didn't have any theology figured out. I couldn't have told you how Noah fit all those animals on the ark. I couldn't have told you why we could still trust a 2,000-year-old book or a 4,000-year-old scriptures. But I felt like maybe God heard me. And I opened my eyes. I didn't see any visions. I didn't hear any voices. But I had the sense that I was being truthful and that perhaps things would begin to change in my life. And they did. And I started going to church more often. I began to read the Bible. And it began to change me on the inside. A minister friend of mine once said to me, Kirk, if anybody ever asks you, how did you find God in Hollywood? He said, let me remind you. You didn't find God. He wasn't lost. You were. And he found you. And I think that's a perfect description. I remember walking onto the set of Growing Pains. And it wasn't uncommon for Mike Seaver to have a new girlfriend in any particular episode. And I saw this young lady sitting on the side of the set, kind of keeping to herself. She had a Walkman on and was listening to some music. And she had a necklace with a cross on her neck. And I noticed that. I got into a conversation with her. And she looked up at me with these big brown eyes. And I just sort of, ha ha. I melted. And I thought, wow, she's just so far out of my league. I can't even think about potential of anything here. And then, horror of horrors, I read the script one Monday morning for a brand new episode. And in the script, Mike Seaver and this girl together were in an acting class in the episode. And I think it was a play. And in the play, my character is leaving on a train for a long time and says goodbye to her and gives her a kiss goodbye. And I just panicked. And I'm realizing, I've got to kiss her. By Friday, I've got to have the courage to do this. And so, because I knew that if she ever found out that I had the kissing abilities of a chicken, all bets were off. We rehearsed all week. And we got to that part. And I would just read the stage direction. And then, Mike kisses Kate. And then, I'd move on with my lines. And then, it got to Friday. And the camera guys were just like, Kirk, you're going to have to kiss her. You can't put this off any longer. I'm like, I know. And we got to that scene. And the audience came in. There's hundreds of people there. And I thought, I've got to break the ice. I've got to do something to distract. And so, I went backstage. I started, I don't know what gave me the idea. But I rummaged through the medical kit. I found a tube of Ambasol, which is like Ora-gel. It's this gum-numbing liquid, like gel, like Novocaine. I put it on my lips like Vaseline, thinking, this is going to be awesome. I came back out. We got to that part. I leaned in. I kissed her. And she kind of backed away and looked at me. And I could tell it started working. And her lips started getting all tingly and numb. And she started to try to lick off this gooey stuff on her lips, like this. And all of a sudden, her tongue starts to go numb. And she's unable to talk. And I looked at her. And I said, I'm so sorry. I should have warned you. This is the normal reaction girls have when I kiss them. It's paralyzing. And that was the only way that I could get through this very first kiss, was to turn it into a joke. And I think that may have been the charm that set the hook. And why we're still married after 30 years. Actually, Chelsea and I waited six years before we started having kids. And we got talking about what that might look like. Chelsea and I started talking about the subject of adoption. And this came up pretty naturally, because my wife Chelsea is an adopted child. And so this was something that was always a part of her life, and something that she's always wanted to do. And I said, well, why don't we start a family through adoption? I mean, we want to be parents. There's kids out there who need a home. Let's go. And I don't know, within maybe six months to a year, we adopted our first child. And we got a little baby boy placed in our hands. And I became a dad. And she became a mom. A year later, we adopted a little girl. And a year later, another little girl. And a year later, we adopted another little boy. And then one day, Chelsea saw me doing nothing around the house one afternoon and said, hey, I think the kitchen sink is broken. So I went into the sink. I looked underneath. Nothing looked broken to me. I looked on top. And there, at the cold water spigot, was a pregnancy test. And it read positive. And I was like, what does this mean? And she's like, we're going to have a baby. And sure enough, nine months later, Olivia is born. And then a year after that, the sink broke again. And then James was born. And so we wind up with a half a dozen kids. But it's just been awesome. We've had this full house of kids. It's been great. And we wouldn't have it any other way. I remember taking our son to preschool for the very first day. And it was highly recommended. The school was great. People were really sweet. But I still felt like I'm dropping my child off and giving them to the wolves. You know, like, I don't know what they're going to do or what they're going to say or what he's going to learn. I started looking what the kids were being taught in junior high school. And high school, I felt like this isn't lining up with what we're wanting our kids to learn. Why would I send my kids to a discipleship camp for seven or eight hours a day to teach them to hate everything that we have taught them? A friend of mine once said, if you send your children to Caesar to be educated, don't be surprised if they come back Romans. And then I had some friends begin to tell me the benefits of homeschooling. Well, this was too far out in the fringe for me. I was thinking homeschooling. Like, are you kidding me? Like, who homeschools their kids? This sounds like some Amish thing, some sort of weird religious thing. But the alternative was so unattractive to us. And I so wanted to spend more time with our kids and teaching them that I started looking into it. And I was blown away at the opportunities and the scope of curriculum and community and adventure. And the whole concept began to get very exciting. And so we took the plunge and we pulled all of our kids out of school, traditional school, and we decided to home educate them. And it was one of the very best things we ever did for our family. Not only do I think they got an excellent education, but during those years, we were able to spend time with our kids that you can never get back. Also to be able to socialize them in ways that are actually a lot healthier than just being actually quarantined with 300 other, you know, hormone-driven 13-year-olds with smartphones in their pocket. That's not really great socialization. What's really great socialization is being around old people, young people, middle-aged people, boys, girls, people out in the real world and experiencing the world that they're going to walk into so that they get a sense of who they want to be and what they want to do rather than just learning how to take tests and be pressured to fit in with their peers. And so it's been so unique. And it's been so cool because we feel like we have the hearts of our kids and we know them and we've got a good relationship with them. I think that home educating our kids was a really big part of that. It's funny because some people say, wow, Kirk, you know, if you didn't take that turn toward faith, think of all the great stuff you could have done. I have a nephew who said, Kirk, tell me you took advantage of the opportunities you had at 17 years old with all those girls who were falling all over you when you're on growing pains. You know, tell me you didn't waste that. And I'm like, bro, I found something so much better. I found a girl. She was beautiful on the inside. She was beautiful on the outside. I married her and we've been married for 30 years. You have no idea how much more valuable that is, right? I've got six grown children who love God and still ask me my opinions about things, who still love to come home and be with me and my wife. And I'm on PragerU Stories of Us. I mean, the story doesn't really end much better than this. My daughter has a sign that a little piece of paper, she likes to write poetry. And she had this quote on her wall that inspires her. And it said, it's the same boiling water that softens potatoes that hardens eggs. And the bottom said, it just depends on what you're made of. And so the same difficult challenges and influences of Hollywood that turn some people sour and make them narcissistic and bitter and joyless and afraid to not fit in is the same pressure that actually softened my heart and caused me to embrace gratitude and be thankful for the life that I have and want to use a platform and this Hollywood industry to advance the good. And so I really think it's what you're made of. And if you don't know what you're made of, don't look to your environment or your industry or other people to give you an identity. There was somebody who made you. Ask him and you can be sure that the ending of the story is going to be fantastic.