Kevin and Sam Sorbo Share a Miraculous Story

God’s Not Dead in Hollywood:

Kevin and Sam Sorbo Share a Miraculous Story

Editor’s note: Kevin and Sam Sorbo are Hollywood stars who love Jesus Christ. Kevin is most well known for playing Hercules in the 1990’s and most recently GOD’S NOT DEAD. He also won the Grace Award at the Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala & Report to the Entertainment Industry in 2010 for his role in the movie WHAT IF. His wife Sam also acts, is an author and has a national syndicated radio show. 

Dr. Baehr: “You sent me your book, True Strength: My Journey from Hercules to Mere Mortal – and How Nearly Dying Saved My Life, and it’s about an incredible miracle, but I wanted to hear more about it. In a more compact form.”

Sam: “He worked too hard. He is very, very driven. He is the type where he is just full throttle and full speed ahead. He had an aneurysm in his shoulder that was sending clots down into his arm. So there was a tingling in his left hand and pain. He didn’t think he should go to the hospital or get it checked out. He saw several doctors over a period of time, none of whom really diagnosed it properly. …By the time they realized that he had a lump in his shoulder, they had planned to do a biopsy. So he went to see his chiropractor.”

Kevin: “Well the clots were being fed off for months in my left arm down into my fingers. It was during the last three months of season five of HERCULES, and I was just blowing it off. I was just, you know, I was a jock; I was doing all my stunts; I thought I was invincible. Sam kind of picked up what happened, and we came back to the United States. I went to see my chiropractor, and in the eight years I’ve been to him he has never cracked my neck. I’m lying on the table, and a Voice that said: ‘don’t let him crack your neck.’ I looked up at the doctor and asked him if he said something. He said he didn’t say anything. I closed my eyes and again I hear the Voice louder: ‘Do not let him crack your neck.’ Why is this voice telling me this? He has never cracked my neck in eight years.”

Dr. Baehr: “So, you heard from God.”

Kevin: “Oh, there’s no question. As I’m debating with God, he cracks my neck. That bump that was an aneurism that was so close to the artery feeding the brain, that manipulation forced three of those clots to my brain, and I suffered three strokes.”

Dr. Baehr “So you were almost immobile. “

Kevin: “I’m very fortunate, I guess on one hand where two of them went down center and one to my vision. So I lost ten percent vision in both eyes, but balance was a huge problem for me. I walked like a drunk man for a month and a half.”

Sam: “He was 235 lbs. leaning on me as we walked into the ER, and I’m like ‘Ok baby I can’t really hold you up much more.”

Kevin: “It was weird it was the same day the Princess Diana died. So that was dominating a lot of the news covers, and I just remember as I was leaning into her, and she’s bringing me into the ER that it was a beautiful, September, blue sky day. I just said ‘I’m going to die today.’”

Dr. Baehr: “Now did you think you were going to recover?”

Kevin: “No, I thought I was going to die that day. There was no question in my mind.”

Dr. Baehr: “You’re recovery is tremendous.”

Kevin: “It is. It was long. It wasn’t fun. It took three years to feel 100% but it took four months of rehab in order to walk again.  I still had a lot of problems with balance and vertigo and the sensation of falling backwards 24 hours a day for about a year and a half. I had a vibration sound forever. It was just buzz. “

Sam: “It wasn’t tinnitus, but it was like when somebody gets tinnitus. It was a ringing in the ears. “

Kevin: “I think it was because my brain was trying to rewiring itself and trying to figure out why it couldn’t go through this area anymore.”

Kevin:  “Um, you know, I remember at Sam’s apartment in Beverly Hills working my way up to the top of a building and sitting there looking out, and I just wept.  I openly wept. I felt like somebody had died. I felt like I lost somebody. “

Dr. Baehr: “And, you recovered completely?”

Kevin: “For the most part, I still have the ten percent loss of vision. That stuff will probably never come back, but the balance is a long slow with process. She beat me up a lot, because you go through that feeling-sorry-for-yourself and blaming God – blaming the world. She gave me a goal. She made me get up and look in a mirror every day and tell myself that I’m getting better and getting stronger. Say it everyday until you believe it. It helped me get better. I’m a very strong willed person, and she said I pushed myself, I did way beyond what the doctors told me.”

Dr. Baehr: “Well, Sam, you said you had several miracles yourself.”

Sam: “Yeah, I’m sitting next to one of them.”

Dr. Baehr: “Is that the miracle you’d like to talk about?”

Sam: “Well, the miracle for me was in writing my book. As you know I wrote a book called THE ANSWER: PROOF OF GOD AND HEAVEN. While I was writing the book it was a journey. It was a journey discovering God and Jesus Christ for me. Even though I knew what the book was about of course…. I’m writing the book. Doing all the research that was still required to put into the book, I grew a lot closer with God. It was also during the time as the big financial collapse. So, I was struggling with the economy, our personal economy. We just moved. We were in construction in a new house. Money was going out; money was not coming in. It was a big crisis for us. I prayed a lot about it, but I was writing the book at the same time. It was the strangest thing because I was reaching sort of a breaking point, and my banker called me and said: ‘Hey, it just occurred to me you might want to do this. It’s really just sort of switching the names of things, but I think it might help you out.’ It changed our finances without changes our finances. It was all perspective. So, to me the miracle was God showing me that life is about your perspective. It doesn’t matter where you are it matters where you feel like you are. Everything shifted for me with this phone call. I prayed really strong about it the night before. Like ‘God, just show me the way. Show me some hope. Give me some message where I understand how things are going to work out.’ It was a very difficult time, and the very next day this guy calls completely unsolicited says ‘Hey, I was just thinking what if we did this? We could move this around.’

Dr. Baehr: “So Kevin married a miracle.”

Sam: “She’s the brains of it all”

Dr. Baehr: “Is your walk with God closer after all this? I mean Sam just said her walk is closer.”

Kevin: “Oh, there’s no question. I mean once you come to the reality…. One thing she said to me was look it happened to you it was tough on the ego. I mean I’m playing the strongest man in HERCULES.  It was tough on being a man and thinking I was invincible.”

Sam: “I mean part of the appeal of HERCULES was the long hair and the big whoosh of the: ‘What was that, I got to take care of business now.’ He couldn’t do it. They had to leave it out of the script for a while.”

Kevin: “Well I went from fourteen hour work day to a one hour work day when I went back four months later.”

Dr. Baehr: “You met on HERCULES right? And, it was God right?”

Sam: “Oh, yeah. So, I had reached an age where I was like, ok God, I get it. I’m going to have to compromise. What’s the compromise going to be? Right? Because I’m uh…what’s the word I’m looking for…”

Kevin: “Difficult!”

Sam: “High maintenance! No! So I reached a point where I’m like: Is he going to be shorter than me? Is he going to be stupid? Is he going to be…. What’s the compromise? Because I want to get married, and I want to have kids. I flew down to New Zealand, just days after this conversation with myself.”

Kevin: “With an agent telling you not to: ‘You don’t want to do that stupid show.’ We’re the most watched show in the world for crying out loud.”

Sam: “I was supposed to audition for the show the year before. It didn’t work. It was a weird thing where it didn’t work out. So, the night before I played a game where you picture a thing, and it’s your soul mate. It was a weird thing you picture a horse, but the horse turns out to be your soul mate. I pictured my horse. I was right up close with the horse. I was looking right in the horse’s eye. It was this magnificent, muscular, white/grey horse with the long, flowy main. At the end of the game, you discover that the horse that you pictured is supposed to be your soul mate. I flew down to New Zealand.”

Kevin: “And because you were late in getting down because of the volcano blowing up in New Zealand. They delayed all flights for twenty-four hours. I had to do yet another reading, after my fourteen hour day.”

Sam: “He didn’t want to be there.”

Kevin: “No, because I just had done the reading with the other cast the night before and you know, then we had another one.”

Sam: “It wasn’t that bad though right?”

Kevin: “And I walked into the room. You take it from here. I walked into the room.”

Sam: “So I hugged him first thing, and he gets embarrassed he goes, oh, ok we’ll do the Hollywood thing.”

Dr. Baehr: “So, you fell in love on the set.”

Kevin: “Yeah.”

Dr. Baehr: “And then you both came to Christ at the same time, right? No, you grew up in the church.”

Kevin: “I grew up in the church. I was a Christian my whole life. I grew up Lutheran with a very strict pastor. The pastor was very strict. I remember when I was eleven years old I asked my mom, well I didn’t ask her, I just said I don’t think God’s that angry. I think he cares about us. This guy was a very fire and brimstone. So, when I moved out to LA, I was a Christian assembly type of church. It wasn’t Methodist, it wasn’t Lutheran, it was just a Christian church. But, she actually introduced me to the church where we went.”

Dr. Baehr: “Sam, you didn’t grow up a Christian did you?”

Sam: “No, I was raised Jewish by an atheist.”

Kevin: “Go figure that one out.”

Sam: “I found Christ in my mid-twenties and then found a church.”

Kevin: “Years before we met.”

Sam: “Well, I went on a search when I was moving to LA. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s got to be more than this,’ and so I went on a search for God. I studied astrology for a while, and that only takes you so far. And, I’m ok, so there must be a God.  So, then where is this God.  So I went to Synagogue and did not find him there. I asked a friend of mine…. This is also a great miracle or story. I asked a friend of mine if she went to church, and she looks at me and goes, ‘Yes, why?’ And I said I would really appreciate it if you would take me to church with you.  Well, she had left the church because she didn’t want to evangelize. She felt the church told her she had to go and testify to people all the time. So, when I went and asked, she had only recently found this church that she just enjoyed, right? So, when I asked her, ‘would you take me to church with you,’ she goes, ‘Well ok God, if that’s what you’re talking about. I’ll do that.’ I went to church with her, and that became my church immediately. It was great.”

Dr. Baehr: “That’s a beautiful story. “

Kevin: “I remember when Sam brought me to her church because it was during my illness. It was during my four months of recovery before going back to New Zealand to try to start working again. I just wept the whole first two months of Sundays. The music was so…I was like uh! Because I knew….I’ve always believed I mean I know I have my different levels of where I am as a Christian. But I’ve always considered myself a Christian, so I don’t look at myself as reborn. I never stopped believing in God or Jesus, but that certainly made me wake up and say, you know what, There’s more to life than me playing this silly little character on TV. I’m grateful for that character because it opened up a lot of doors for me, but at the same time my mom has always said health was the most important thing besides family and God.”

Dr Baehr: “What I think is a miracle is I’ve watched from ‘what if’ which had that great scene in it, it just makes me weep every time. You did that scene so well.”

Kevin: “Thank you”

Dr Baehr: “And the career has just I mean it’s not a Hollywood career anymore, it’s a bigger than Hollywood career.”

Kevin: “The Hollywood’s banned me.”

Dr Baehr: “You’re kidding.”

Kevin: “I’ve read for one pilot this year.”

Dr Baehr: “…Every time I email you though, you’re doing a movie.”

Kevin: “They’re coming directly to me. They are rarely coming through Cherry my manager.  They’re just coming directly to me through the people I’ve either worked with before or word of mouth from other people. It’s been good.  You know they’re not all winners, but I think I’m happy with 80% of the movies I’ve done. “

Dr Baehr: “Everybody I know loves ‘God’s Not Dead’. And every time I go on Sam’s show she tells me it’s the best movie ever! “

Kevin: “You know what’s interesting, because of Hercules this is a show you get invited to comic-con shows. These are the fantasy sci-fi world, and these are the fantasy sci-fi geeks. The last two I’ve done in the last two months since the movie has come out, 50 percent of the people come up to me and say I saw ‘God’s not Dead’ I loved it, I mean you don’t get that at that type of setting. It’s amazing. I’m not exaggerating. They wish I had ‘God’s not Dead’ picture to sign.”

Dr. Baehr: “Well, it broke my heart when you died.”

Sam: “ It broke his heart too!”

Kevin: “There’s a sequel.”

Dr. Baehr: “We won’t talk about the sequel.”

Sam: “I was talking with a director the other day, and he is doing a movie. It’s a faith-based movie, but he doesn’t want to be so preachy. He doesn’t want to be preaching to the choir. I said you know, the choir is really interested in getting preached to right now. I said, people didn’t go see “God’s not Dead’ and go ‘I thought that was a boxing movie, that’s so weird’. No, they went go see ‘God’s not Dead’. This is what people want. They want to have the discussion about eternity.”

Dr. Baehr: “Well it’s the biggest profit making margin of the year. Not the biggest box office, but the profit margin.”

Dr. Baehr:  “Are you going to do any movies together?”

Kevin: “We have one coming up.”

Sam: “We do actually”

Dr. Baehr: “Well one, everybody has to buy and read both books.”

Kevin: “ TOTAL STRENGTH the book actually was born out of her bugging me for years and hugely instrumental and reminding me because she, I meant here was a lot of the story that I didn’t remember.”

Dr. Baehr: “It reads really well.”

Kevin and Sam: “Thank you!”

Dr. Baehr: “And your book is?”

Sam: “THE ANSWER: PROOF OF GOD AND HEAVEN! Because there’s proof!! There’s absolute proof. It’s great if you have a miracle. A miracle can convince you. But then, your faith is tested. You can go back to the miracle, but some people don’t experience a miracle or don’t recognize it when it happens. So, it’s always good to have absolute proof, which is why I wrote the book. “

Dr. Baehr: “I’ll give you my two theories of miracles which I didn’t intend to do. One, miracle is a Latin word for “billboard” or “sign” pointing this way: ‘God is here.’ Also, a miracle is never a miracle after it happens. You know, if you’re dying and praying and saying, ‘God save me,’ and suddenly have a miracle miraculous recovery.  After it happens, the doctors say well evidently we can account for it. Everybody explains away miracles once they happen. So, the key is understanding that the billboard is pointing to God who says you wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t speak to you.”

Sam: “I like that.”

Kevin: “What did I learn? I learned to listen to that voice.”

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