How a Near-Death Experience Taught This GAF Actor to ‘Rely on the Lord’

Published: August 15, 2025

By India McCarty

Actor Jesse Hutch reflected on the near-death experience that taught him to “fully rely on the Lord.”

“That day on the river…had started out like any other,” he wrote in an essay for Guideposts. When he was younger, Hutch served a river raft guide and had never had any issues on the water before.

However, when one of the people on the boat fell overboard, they panicked and grabbed Hutch’s life vest, pulling him underwater. He tried not to panic, but, Hutch wrote, “The problem was, my mind knew I was underwater, but my body demanded to take a breath. Logic fought instinct. Instinct won.”

“’I’m done,’ I thought. ‘I’m in your hands, Lord,’” Hutch wrote. “The sound of the water disappeared, and everything went black. I disconnected from all physical sensation. Was this my soul leaving my body? I felt immense fear yet, at the same time, inexplicable peace. I’d never known such fear was possible. Or such peace…”

Miraculously, Hutch was saved from the water. Another rafting group found him floating in the water and got him to shore, where he was taken to the hospital.

“I shouldn’t have survived. And even if I had, I should have been too severely brain-damaged to walk or talk again,” he wrote.

After his recovery, Hutch wanted to conquer his new fear of the river he had spent so much time on. He decided to swim the river, with a friend in a boat following closely after him. The swim went well, and Hutch “felt such relief and gratitude that I was no longer bound by my fear. ‘Lord, now I have given you everything.'”

“Just as I heard the sound of the water the day I nearly drowned, I heard a response. ‘No, you haven’t,'” Hutch recalled. “Hadn’t I demonstrated my faith by doing the thing I feared most?”

He then pictured a giant piece of wood being broken like a toothpick by God’s power.

“At last, I understood. All these years I’d been trying so hard to be strong — training to get into top shape, pushing away anyone who wanted to help — that I never let myself fully rely on the Lord, the only one who was powerful enough to watch over my life,” he explained. “My deepest fear wasn’t the water. It was vulnerability. I’d confused it with weakness.”

Hutch concluded, “I promised myself — and God — that from then on, I would be open to wherever he was leading me, to whomever he put in my path.”

The actor often speaks about the important role faith plays in his life, telling the “See Hear Love” podcast, “I think faith actually opens your world and it allows you to find a peace…there’s this aspect where you go, ‘You know what, I am who I am. This is what God made me.’”

“My faith highly influences everything in my life,” he told The Christian Post. “It’s not just some flippant thing, and it’s not just something that I label my life; ‘I’m a Christian actor.’ Nope. I’m an actor, I’m a father, I’m a husband, I’m a brother, I’m a stranger. There are a lot of labels you could put on me, and yet, at the end of the day… =God, Jesus Christ, is my leader, and so that’s where it starts, and that’s where I begin, and everything else comes out from that.”

Hutch’s brush with death and miraculous recovery helped him accept that he needed to be vulnerable and fully rely on God in his life.