Kirk Cameron: Hollywood Icon and a Child of God

Takeaways: Kirk Cameron sits with Matt and Laurie Crouch on TBN’s Praise to discuss going from atheist to Christian, life in Hollywood, and TBN.

Today…….I am asking all my prayer warriors to say a prayer that may help others. So many people are hurting right now. Many are struggling with finances and need jobs. Some are facing foreclosure and don’t even know how they are going to make it from week to week..

Many are lonely. . Many are heartbroken. . Many are facing sickness and health is fading. . Some are dealing with difficult family members. Many have lost HOPE.. Tonight, let us put our prayers and faith together decree and declare breakthrough over our families. Financial miracles WILL take place. Jobs WILL be found. Our Bodies WILL be made whole & sickness WILL flee. Marriages and relationships WILL be restored. Family members WILL find Jesus. Heartbreaks WILL be healed. JOY WILL be restored and HOPE WILL be found. In Jesus Name. Amen!!!!!! Keep God First…….

I’m a man just like everybody else.
And the only thing that keeps me from heading toward the flame is the kindness, the grace and the mercy of God.
And I recognize it and I think it’s, it’s a great place to be, is always on your knees.
Always dependent. Always recognizing that you’re one bad decision away from, from losing everything.
Let’s go back to the beginning. OK? Teen Idol.
I’m looking at Tiger Beat magazine.
We’re talking, you know, all of this really fun stuff that that happened to you. Start at the beginning. OK?
You grew up, you didn’t even want, you didn’t even know to be an actor.
You didn’t know, OK, start the beginning in the beginning, God created the hair. It is.
So in the very beginning. Uh let’s see. So I have three little sisters.
Dad’s a school teacher teaches math and pe uh my mom’s at home with us uh teaching macro classes in the garage.
Remember Macro? Yes, we made beautiful macros. That’s, that’s right. Pot hangers and male carry. Yeah. The whole thing.
Uh I never wanted to be an actor. I wanted to grow up and become a, a surgeon, a doctor.
Uh But my mom was friends with Adam Rich’s mother. Now, Adam was on a show called Eight Is Enough.
He was a little kid on that show.
And she would always say to my mom, you should take your kids to this agent and see if they could get some representation and you know, do a mcdonald’s commercial.
So my mom did and she signed me up and I started working on little things here and there.
What age? I was nine. OK. Never really liked. It, didn’t really wanna do it.
Uh I was, I was always annoyed having to brush my hair and tuck my shirt in to go drive an hour in traffic to audition for the next commercial.
But you were an adorable little nine year old, right? I used to be cute.
I don’t know what happened, but I was adorable as a kid and uh some of these beginners uh could prove that.
But when I was about 14, I auditioned for this new TV show starring Alan Thicke called Growing Pains.
And at that time, it was just another pilot. There’s lots of pilots every year.
Most of them never make it. But this one was different. But you were late. So tell the late part.
So I was late for the audition probably because I was dragging my feet.
I didn’t wanna brush my hair, tuck in my shirt and my mom just dropped me off in the parking lot and said, run in there and see if they’ll still let you audition.
So I knocked on the door. They said, I’m sorry, auditions are done.
I said my mom’s gonna kill me, please. Just let me audition.
And so they let me in and I auditioned and they called me back and I got another call back and eventually audition for the network.
And they gave me the role. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.
I wouldn’t have met my wife, who knows where the Lord would have me right now.
If it weren’t for showing up at a, at a late audition, you’d be a doctor, you’d be in scrubs and could this pandemic thing would, yeah, you wouldn’t have a pandemic if he was a doctor.
There we go. All right. So you’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna be bouncing back and forth here.
First of all, um Kirk, your, your present day uh contribution to what you’re doing here at TB N is super meaningful.
Thank you for what you’re doing. Takeaways is just an unbelievable show.
So your platform that was created by an audition that you were late for everything.
I feel sorry for you. And you were, you went from this adorable little kid that did, you know, nine seasons of a network series, uh growing Pains.
And then that made a way for kind of what you do today.
Take, take us to one of the meaningful moments of takeaways and and how, how this is working for you.
So, um now, first of all, I, I, I never wanted to be an actor and so to be doing a talk show, like takeaways and meeting so many interesting people having a chance to learn and have these fascinating conversations and then share them with the world and then give some actionable takeaways that we can download into our life uh for the sake of improving our faith.
Um uh making our, our families healthier is awesome.
This is, this is an honor and something I never would have planned for my life if I were writing the script, right again, I, I wanted to become a doctor.
And so I, I look back now and I say, wow, God had a story planned out that I had no clue about and I’m so glad that it went that way that he saved me at 18 years old.
I was an atheist not looking for God didn’t want to go to church and, and, and yet here I am.
And uh wow, I’m super great. How did you get even interested in knowing the Lord? How did it?
I mean, you go from below zero because you’re an atheist at a young age.
How did you know you were an atheist or feel like you were one?
So I wouldn’t have called myself uh a strong atheist as we know that term today.
I think I would have said there’s no evidence for God.
There’s just, you know, I don’t believe in God and none of my friends were Christians and the ones that I knew who were Christians.
I thought that was pretty silly. I didn’t go to church. We never talked about God.
Uh I, I put God uh in, in the category of a different Trinity.
Uh the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy and God in my mind, that’s where he belongs.
Santa Claus, Santa Claus, right? That kind of thing.
Um And it wasn’t until I was about 17 years old that somebody took me to church and I heard a message from a preacher and I didn’t believe what he was saying, but he did, he was speaking with passion.
He had a Bible in his hand and guess who the preacher was? Chuck Swindall. Oh my goodness.
I didn’t know who he was, but I left with lots of questions and I asked this friend’s father to talk to me about science and evolution in the Bible and other religions.
And how can you believe a book that’s 2000 years old and um or much older than that actually.
And then he eventually said, Kirk, if you wanna know if God is real.
Uh and you can’t tell by everything that’s, that’s around.
You, talk to him, ask him, but you’ve got to come to him on his terms, humility and faith.
I didn’t really have much of either. One as a teen idol atheist back in the day.
Um, but I was sitting in my sports car parked on the side of the road thinking about the fact that one day I could die and find out if what that preacher said was true and if there’s a heaven, I wouldn’t be going.
And so I remember praying for the first time.
Uh, and I just said, God, if you’re there, I wanna know if you’re real.
Would you show me and would you, would you forgive me from the wrong things that I’ve done?
Because I, I know I’ve done wrong things.
Uh And would you make me the man that you created me to be?
And again, I, I didn’t know if I was just talking into the air or what, but I had this sense when I finished that.
Perhaps I just spoke to the God of the universe and maybe he would answer me and he was so kind to do more than that.
He changed me on the inside and I began going to church and somebody gave me a bible and I began to follow Jesus as the Lord of my life and everything changed from that point on your family’s reaction to this change in Kirk.
So I find out when I tell my mom and dad that I wanna go to church that my mom says you do, I’ve always wanted us to go to church.
I was a Christian when I was a little girl, my, my parents took me to church.
But, you know, as we got older, we just never really went and, you know, we wanted you kids to make your own decisions.
And at that time, my parents were actually um in the midst of a separation.
And so this actually became something that brought our family closer together, going to church.
Maybe that would help, maybe that would bring us closer together as a family.
And then all of a sudden one by one, like Domino’s uh my family members started to get saved my sisters, my mom, and then eventually my dad and I even had a chance to baptize my father several years later.
So I’m super, super grateful to the way that that God worked in our family.
So what do you, what do you attribute the moment that you went from Jesus as part of the Santa Claus and, and Easter bunny Trinity to maybe I’m actually talking to the creator of the universe.
That’s, that’s quite the jump. It is.
And, and is there a, is there a uh a little bit of connective tissue there that you can tell us about that work for you?
I I two things immediately come to my mind.
One is I realized that when you’re talking about God, you’re talking about eternity, you’re talking about very significant things.
I remembered that I was part of the ultimate statistic 10 out of 10 people die.
Uh We don’t, we can’t get around it.
Uh As Phil Robertson always likes to say, we’re all headed for a 6 ft hole, right?
And there’s only one way out of that hole.
Uh And I thought, you know, I’m gonna find out and this is forever and the truth is as much as I love science.
I knew that there are mysteries in the universe that cannot be explained.
We don’t have enough knowledge to understand a fraction of how we got here, why we’re here, how it all happened.
And so that alone humbled me and made me say I maybe I don’t know everything.
And then the other thing was I got a book from this friend called More Than a Carpenter by Josh mcdowell.
And that little book presented this dilemma.
He called the Trilemma that Jesus made such outlandish statements about himself that he was either lying or he was a lunatic and thought he was telling the truth, but he wasn’t or he was lord of the universe.
Those are the only three options. Later. He, he added legend to that Trilemma.
And as I read through that, it gave me the ability to open the door intellectually to examine the scriptures and the resurrection and the claims of Christ without feeling like I was believing, it was the equivalent of believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.
Because so much evidence is piled up for the reliability of the scriptures, for instance, so much needs to be accounted for if you want to say that all of the universe popped out of nothing as a result of nobody designing it.
And so that got me thinking, you know, I’m gonna read guys like William Lane Craig.
I’m gonna read guys like Bruce Metzger.
I’m gonna read and listen to intelligent people that have devoted their life to this.
And I finally became persuaded that it was not intellectually silly to believe in a creator and to embrace the resurrection as a historical fact.
So that was sort of the head problem, the, the intellectual problem, but it was the conscience that drove me to my knees realizing that one day I will die.
And if I stand before God, I’m guilty, I’m on the hook morally and I need his forgiveness.
And so I wanted for God to change me into who he wanted me to be. Ok.
Let’s talk about Chelsea for a minute. Yeah. God is so, so kind.
How, how was Chelsea going on this journey with you?
Well, you know, I, I met Chelsea actually, she was Mike Sear’s girlfriend.
So I married Mike Sear’s girlfriend. I stole her out from underneath him and best decision I ever made.
But I actually met her on the set of my sister, Candace’s Show Full House.
She was on the set, she was visiting a friend there and I, I met her and I remember my mom saying to me one day uh when I was on the set of full house Kirk, do you remember that girl that you met?
That beautiful brown eyed, brown haired girl? And I said, oh, yeah, how could I forget? She’s, she’s beautiful.
She said, you know, I’ve seen her here before and she is even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside.
She’s such a beautiful heart, such a beautiful person.
That’s the kind of person that I’m praying you meet and marry.
One day a year later, I meet her on growing pains. She becomes my girlfriend a year or so.
After that, we get married and now we’re married for 30 years. She was, she a Christian at the time.
She was a Christian at the time. So she helped pull, pull you, draw you. How, how did that happen?
Yeah. So, so we were sort of, I think God captured our, our attention and we were born again at relatively the same time.
Uh She grew up in a family that went to church.
I grew up in a family that didn’t go to church.
But we both came to this realization that we wanted to be Christians around the same time.
And then I guess it was about a year after that, that we met up on the set of growing pains.
And so did you have anything to do with the casting of her as your girlfriend? Didn’t?
I had no, had no, you, no choices.
The execs didn’t come to you and show you pictures and say which one do you? No, no.
II, I think there was sort of AAA a divine casting director that was probably behind all of this.
And I’m, I’m really glad that, ok, you want to tell about your first kiss or? Sure.
Great memory you wanna hear about it. OK? We could tell our first kiss.
You can even that first kiss right now.
But I, I don’t know, not knowing that first kiss that you appropriate.
All right, listen, here’s how, here’s how the first kiss uh went down.
So I’m on the set of maybe our second or third episode acting together.
And is there a vibe already?
There’s a little bit of a vibe but I’m thinking I’m so she’s so far out of my league that I would embarrass myself by even hinting that I was interested in this girl.
So I was not letting on at this, that I was for sure 100% because you look at all these little, these little tiger beat pictures that cheesy as can be, right?
My kids are embarrassed about these pictures.
My son says to me, dad, the picture with you in the tank top with the snake around your neck, flexing you.
He’s like dad. That was so selfish. You should have thought of us back then.
I’m like not again, you weren’t even a twinkle in my eye.
I don’t know what to say to you. He should have been thinking you should.
So, so the story is, uh, in the, my character was supposed to kiss her character in this scene that we were doing a play like our town or something.
And I was leaving on a, on a train and I’d never see her again.
And I gave her a kiss goodbye and said, don’t worry, I’ll be back one day and I’m reading this going.
Oh no, I’ve gotta kiss her.
I haven’t even told her that I, I’m inside, I’m, I’m crazy about her and I’m so nervous and I thought all week we rehearsed and I just got to that part and I, and I said, and then Mike kisses Kate and then we would just move on and I never, never rehearsed that.
And then it came the time in front of the audience and we taped the episode and I was so nervous.
I had to break the ice with some kind of a joke.
So for relief, I said, hold on and I ran backstage and I went into the prop department and, and rummaged through the first aid kit and I found some ambas that’s like Orel.
It’s that, it’s that gum numbing liquid.
You put on your tooth if you got a toothache and I put it all over my lips, like Vaseline.
So I come out with my lips all shiny and I say, OK, I’m ready and, uh, roll the tape and, and then we, we play the play out the scene and I kiss her and she pulls away and looks at me because you could smell it or what.
No, because her lips started going numb and she starts trying to lick it off of her lips and her tongue freezes up so she can’t talk and she’s standing there speechless and I just sort of play the whole thing off.
Cool. Like, hey, I should have warned you, this is the normal reaction women have when I kiss them.
You know, it’s, it’s not you like a nervous character to me.
Well, again, I was so nervous that I had to make a joke out of it.
But I think it worked because she said yes. And we’re still married. I love that.
How did you bridge the gap from being a nervous in love with this girl to actually seriously asking her out?
How did that happen? Yeah. Well, you know, am had a lot to do with, I bought lots of stock in Ames since, since that day.
Um, you know, I had tickets to go to a Michael W Smith concert. There you go.
And, you know, he’s been around forever because he’s Yeah.
And, and I was like, hey, and, and I found out that she loved Christian music and I thought there’s no way she’s act, there’s no way she could be a Christian And then I thought, because in my mind I was a brand new Christian and I always knew you had to, somehow you had to carry your own cross.
You had to bear some kind of a burden.
And I thought if I meet a girl, she’s either gonna be gorgeous or Godly, I had no idea you could find one that would be both.
You did. Right. And I, and I thought, well, wow, this is amazing. I hit the jackpot.
I’ve got to ask her out. So we went to a Michael W Smith concert. Does he know that?
Uh, I don’t know Michael.
So my mom found her in an elevator in Tulsa, Oklahoma and asked her how old she was and that she wanted her to meet me and that’s how we met.
It was a random meeting at it. So you didn’t meet her in an elevator.
Your mom met her mom and my mom looked at her and start talking to her.
See, that’s what happened with my mom. She set me up with my wife too. Yeah.
Thank God for moms. One of ours is married. The other one needs help from mom.
Apparently some elevators. Ok.
First of all, before we get too far into the interview, what’s up with the facial hair?
Oh, this Yeah. Yeah. What’s going on there?
I mean, you know, I just figured, uh I had a choice now that I’m 50.
I could stay clean shaven and, uh, and, and, and just kind of keep that aging teen idol look or I could grow the beard and go for the youthful, mature man look.
And I figured youthful, mature man was far more appealing than aging teen idol, aging teen idol.
And, you know, I, someone once said to me, they said, you know, beards are all the rage now, right?
You see guys wearing beards all the time and one guy, I was like, yeah, it’s kind of a trend.
He and the guy looked at me and he goes, hey, look, man, we’ve got words for people who don’t have beards, women and Children grow your beard and I was like, bro.
All right, I received that. I’m, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna go grow my face sweater and I’m gonna wear it proudly.
Ok. So turn into takeaways and ask us a question because that’s what you do on TB N. Ok. Yeah.
So, um, and you’re, you’re, I’m just gonna sit here and until I come up with a complete dead air.
Ok. So ball’s in your court, Kurt. Ok.
Well, I, I can’t help but notice, um, you know, you, you’re pretty stylishly dressed.
You’re a sharp dressed man. You know, I mean, that’s, that’s no surprise but, um, I can’t dress myself like this.
II I, my wife has got to go and buy me some.
If this were me, I would have a sweater that made me look like Mr Rogers, but she gets the one with the racing stripe on the side to kind of offset that.
But you’re always looking slick and sharp and does, does your wife pick out your or is this all you, you, in fact, I pick out her wardrobe?
Oh my goodness. You have flipped the script. Pick out my wardrobe more. Wow, that’s fantastic. Just a gift.
I’m sure that this is all my questions. Just get harder.
If you let me keep going, keep going. I’m not playing. Just do take away.
Come on, you’re a veteran. You’ve been doing this all your life.
I don’t know what else to ask you.
I could um insert crickets and editing, right?
I’ve been, I’ve been on the praise program for so long and obviously there’s, there has been a huge evolution of the Praise the Lord set when I first went on.
Praise the Lord. I mean, I was surrounded by Cherubs and Jesus on a white horse and I was sitting in something a lot more gold than this blue chair.
Are you the set decorator that started to change things or is it, how did all this happen?
There? It is. Look. Um And that’s, that’s, that’s a, that’s an amazing question.
Ho honestly, I always wanted to tell this part.
Um The um the reality is that when and when, when the second generation of TB N fully started and that was when my lovely parents, Paul and Jane Crouch went to be with the Lord.
OK. When my mom passed away, then here we are. Ok.
And there was a, there, there was an interesting time, Kirk where we were a little bit.
Is this my mom and dad’s thing or is this our thing?
And do we do the, what would Paul and Jan do or do we turn it into, what would Jesus do in our generation?
And to answer your interesting question a little deeper than maybe you thought I was going to.
I would say that TB N was spoken into existence by God.
Literally, my mom and dad heard the voice of the Lord simultaneously. I’ve released you from your work here.
My dad looked at my mom and said, you’re not gonna believe what the Lord just said to me.
She said, no, I will. He just said the same thing to me. He’s released us from our work here.
They, they, they, they quit a job and then my dads sitting three months later and he, and the Lord says, call Angel Lerma.
My dad calls the secretary says Paul. Uh Mr Lama is not available.
He was the owner of the TV station. Uh Wait a second hold.
I hear I might hear him coming down the hallway and he answers.
And my dad says, Mr Lerma, I called you a few months ago.
You had no interest in selling your channel, but I wanted to call you again.
Today to see if anything had changed. Long pause on the phone.
He said, Paul, I just got down, I just walked down the hallway. We were in a board meeting.
We just voted to sell this channel. Did you know that?
And he said no, but based on that, I’d like to come see you.
That was TB NS first station divinely orchestrated by the Lord’s timing. How do you answer that, Kirk?
Except God spoke to my parents, release them from their old job.
God spoke at the time, a guy is walking down a hallway after just selling a station or, or voting to sell it.
Ok. So he had a deal done by the end of that day. Business day that started TB N.
So what, what, what, what is that? And what, how does that relate to gold chairs?
Um It’s literally that God’s voice spoke. This ministry into existence.
Your audition for growing pains, started you on a pathway that ended you.
Here, God’s voice spoke TB N into existence. Paul and Jan Crouch 1973. And here we are.
So what does that mean? We do?
We’re not responsible for TB N it is God’s voice spoken into existence.
We stewarded it in our generation. That’s all we’re doing. OK.
What that means is when it was our turn, there was three or four months, we were a little confused.
I remember in this building going into a conference room and before pausing into an important meeting.
I would say I’d pause at the door and say, Lord be with me, you know, holy spirit. No.
Wait, dad, do I? You know, uh, and, and I, I didn’t know who I needed, you know, at the time.
II, I don’t know why. I thought that, but it was just something that I was going through personally.
So I was wondering if I was supposed to embark Paul and Jan was I now they’re in heaven?
Are they looking over and am I supposed to do what they were gonna do in this meeting you? Ok.
I have a night time dream.
My dad is sitting with me and I literally say to him, what am I supposed to do about this situation?
You know, there was no question, there was no words.
But in my mind, I was like at wanting to know a bunch of stuff from them and he smiled at me and left in the dream.
And when I woke up from that dream like this, I mean, nighttime dream woke up.
It felt like the Lord was communicating to me. It’s not my time anymore.
I know the answers to all the questions that you might have, but I’m doing something I could help you if I could.
But I’m here in heaven. It is your time. Ok?
When, when the Lord communicates that to a second generation couple in that bold of a way, a nighttime startle dream.
Then what that says to you is, it’s our time, our time meant we won’t, wouldn’t be comfortable sitting in white and gold chairs.
That meant our generation was going to start seeing a bit of a shift and, and a directional piece that was putting TB N to a larger audience.
You’re part of this very specific plan, Kirk and what you’re doing, even with takeaways, think of who you’ve been interviewing lately, All these great guests and what they’re really, you know, kind of adding to the 24 hour output of what we’re trying to communicate to a sick and a dying world.
And so ultimately, in our generation, we had to in essence, make it us.
We are more comfortable sitting in this set under these lighting conditions, under these furnishing conditions, under this environment.
You’re here comfortable, we’re here comfortable. It represents our generation.
We had to change that and we did it radically and we felt empowered to do it at the same time, your passion for, for, for what you stand for, you are a pillar I will say in Hollywood, standing up for values on every front, for God, for all things pure and holy and moral and all that good stuff.
How, how does that play in your life right now with your kids?
Well, as far as the pure and holy and moral stuff, uh remember I’m an actor, I could be fake in this whole thing.
I know but you do it so well.
You’ve done it, but you have done that for years here on TV.
And you have stood for such beautiful things and I commend you for that because it’s a dog eat, world dog eat dog up there.
You know what I am constantly reminded of is that uh those who are on pedestals, either self made pedestals or pedestals that other people put you on.
Um, often it’s a set up for a great fall.
And we’ve seen so many people within the family of faith, face plant and make terrible mistakes that are not only devastating to their own lives and ministries and careers, but to the lives of the people around them that have so trusted them and, and and depended upon them.
And so I am always very cautious and II, I really do feel like, you know, the, the the spine that holds me up, the only pillar that, that I depend on is the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, the Bible says, and just understanding that God’s given me so much more than I deserve.
If he gave me what I deserve, I would, II, I would be AAA pile of um smoking ashes on this coffee table.
And I, I recognize that and yet um the fear of the Lord has brought me to a place of a love for God.
Jesus is all important to me um because he’s forgiven me He’s granted me eternal life.
And I wanna live my life in a way that says thank you.
And I know that’s a daily thing of working out my salvation with fear and trembling.
So, uh thank you for your kind words and your encouragement.
Uh that puts wind in my sails to keep going. And I, I want to finish.
Well, I want to honor God and my family and I wanna hear well done at the end of the end of the race.
Are you ever gonna put any darkening in your beard or are you just gonna kind of let it go white?
I don’t know. Uh Yeah, I just, you know, they say they say something about it.
White whiskers being wisdom. And so uh you’re gonna let it go.
You must be, you must be rivaling Solomon for the wisest man in the world with as much silver as I see in your hair.
Ok. Whatever. Yeah. My dad didn’t lose a hair on his head.
So I pray that that’s my lot in life too.
Um Then uh when you, when you come here, you care about a lot of modern day issues.
You care about things and you’re strategizing to talk things out with the Dennis Prager of the world and all these great interviews that you’re doing here.
And where does, where, where does this, um where do these subject matter kind of things come from that?
Are you, where are you where are you piecing together your thoughts in regard to your interviews that you’re doing here.
What I love about doing takeaways is I get to, to take the questions that wake me up at two or three o’clock in the morning and get me on my knees praying uh and talk about them with thought leaders who have done extensive work in these areas.
So to talk to with Dennis Prager about uh how politics influence culture and how certain sets of values create the world that our Children will live in in the future.
Um Or to talk to Mike Huckabee or talk to Dinesh de souza about atheism and education or to talk about socialism, communism versus uh western civilization.
These things are fascinating to me when I was a kid, I didn’t think about any of this stuff.
But now that I’m a parent, I realize these things matter because these are the ideas that shape the world that our kids are gonna be living in.
So I, I love it and I’m, I think I’m just naturally curious about things and I like to learn, I like to grow and I figure if I’m interested in these subjects, I think other people would be too.
So to be able to have the conversation out in the open. Like this makes for a great talk show.
You and Chelsea home schooled your kids the whole time or did you start at?
How did that work for you guys and why did you do it?
So, when our kids got to school age, uh, we found a great little private Christian school that our kids went to and we absolutely loved it and then we got to junior high and high school age and, and we just, we weren’t feeling comfortable with the options that were available to us.
And someone said, have you ever thought about home schooling your kids?
And I thought home schooling your kids, like, I’m not a teacher?
I mean, come on, I mean, who home schools their kids?
Uh I mean, do you, do you have to be Amish to home school your kids?
And don’t you care about the education of your Children?
I mean, are you gonna really try to teach them history and science and math and all this?
Uh now I realize the very best thing I did for my family at that age and at that stage of their life was to pull them out of school and to home educate our Children.
And I’ve learned so much about it.
I mean, there is so much curriculum, there is so much community and networking available, there is so much help and assistance and not only that you can tailor your children’s education to what fits their, their strengths and their learning styles and your family dynamic.
I was traveling a lot and so we could create a schedule that allowed us to move together.
Uh And and create our own schedule.
And in fact, I’m actually making a documentary right now together with you here on TBN, that’s all about the home school movement, which has doubled since COVID came along.
It’s quadrupled in the last 20 years and half of that growth has been in just the last couple of years since all of the, the, the government reaction to COVID shut down schools sending kids home into their families.
And now parents are realizing what their kids are being taught in public government schools.
And they’re saying, oh my goodness, I can’t send them back to this. Yeah.
You know, um you stood firm and I think what we’re trying to, I think what we’re saying is that it, it is, it is very noticeable by all of us that, that, you know, in a, in a way that made a difference you stood.
And if that’s been painful, if that’s caused problems, at least we’re here 2022 saying thank you for what you’ve done and the life that you’ve lived all these years, thank you for saying that that is very encouraging to me.
And that that means so much to me.
I, I think like you, I want to hear at the end of this journey, well done, my good and faithful servant.
I don’t wanna fail. Uh And someone who’s been inspiring to me in that regard is Billy Graham.
I think here’s a man who committed himself to the gospel and he never got caught up in moral controversy.
And, you know, I can understand why so many do because we’re so easily drawn toward, you know, our lower nature and the distractions of the world, like a moth seems to be drawn to a flame and just destroys itself.
And that’s why II, I remember that. I’m a man just like everybody else.
And the only thing that keeps me from heading toward the flame is the kindness, the grace and the mercy of God.
And I recognize it and I think it’s a, it’s a great place to be, is always on your knees, always dependent, always, uh recognizing that you’re one bad decision away from, from losing everything.
And so, uh I’m thankful for inspirations like Billy Graham and uh I’m, I’m thankful for your encouragement.