Why This Actor Chose Family Over Dream Career: God ‘Needed Me Grounded’

Published: June 29, 2026

By Shawn Smith

Jarret LeMaster was on his way up in the acting world, appearing in movies and theatre, but then the unexpected happened. He fell in love.

He would eventually get married and have four children, but as LeMaster shared with Movieguide®, it was all in God’s plan that his life took the detour that it did.

“I was on the show that was going to Broadway, then there was this girl that was coming back from Scotland, and she was a Christian, and she knew the Lord, and she really was awesome, and I knew that she would be right for me,” LeMaster recalled, speaking of his now wife Christina.

He didn’t choose to “stick around” and forgo a career on Broadway lightly, but he took it to God in prayer.

“I prayed about it a ton…I always said to the Lord, I’m like, ‘I only want to do what you want me to do. I only want to do things that promote the kingdom or don’t detract from the kingdom’” he said. “And so, that’s where the Lord was like, ‘Okay, but it’s gonna be a longer timeline.’”

It wasn’t until the last few years that his acting career picked up again with minor roles in NEFARIOUS and UNPLANNED and his work with The Babylon Bee as producer, writer and actor.

LeMaster is grateful for the Lord’s timing, saying that it taught him humility and contentment.

“And it took a long time for the Lord to work out…my selfish…dreams and motives, and they still kind of come up all the time. So, like, you got to shut them down,” the 47-year-old said. “He needed me to be grounded. He wanted me to have a family.”

“[T]here were times where it just felt like nothing was going on…I would just be kind of stuck in a rut,” LeMaster said in another interview.

“What God taught me was like I had to be content with whatever He was gonna give me, so if it was just gonna be like obscurity and my family, like my family’s enough,” he went on to say. “And so for him to lump all this other stuff, this amazing stuff on top is like crazy. This whole experience has been absolutely nuts.”

Both he and his wife are actively involved in their children’s life, homeschooling them and bringing them to movie shoots with him even all across the world to places such as Bulgaria.

LeMaster’s story is a testament of the verse in Proverbs 19:21 that reads, “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.”

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