Chaz Smith Shares What Led Him to Putting His Identity in Christ
By Movieguide® Contributor
Social media star and comedian, Chaz Smith, shares the pressures he felt as a kid and the addiction he faced that led him to a deep relationship with God.
Growing up, Smith always felt like he was living in his father’s shadow. Charles Smith, his father, was a longtime NBA player, spending over a decade in the league while also picking up an Olympic gold medal.
“People would always come up to me and be like, ‘Oh, are you gonna play basketball like your dad? Are you gonna do this like your dad? Are you gonna be tall like your dad?’ And I was like, I dunno, I’m eight,” Smith said.
When he finally did start playing basketball, Smith’s heart was never in it; he was playing because the world wanted him to, not because he wanted to. The coaching that he got from his father didn’t help either.
“After games, it was always about correcting mistakes, like what I was doing wrong so that I could be better. But what I heard was, ‘you are not good enough,’” Smith explained.
Smith’s feeling like he was never good enough for his dad eventually bled into his relationship with his heavenly father. Although he grew up in a Christian home, he never understood that, in God’s eyes, he was enough.
“I had to always work to please [God],” Smith said. “If I wasn’t reading scripture, praying, and being on time, doing X, Y, Z, there was always this question in the back of my mind, like,’ am I enough?’”
“If I wasn’t doing enough, then I wasn’t good enough,” he added.
Smith’s relationship with God would remain the same until he went off to college when he started to meet people and hear stories of people who had walked away from the faith after years of following God.
“Somebody claimed to believe in God for years and then all of the sudden, then they just walk away from him, how do I know that He really is real? How do I know that this isn’t just something that my parents brought me up in?” he recalled asking himself.
“I was desperate. I was like, ‘God, if you’re even real, I don’t know if I’m talking to anyone right now, I could be talking to the air, but if you’re real, just show me,” he said.
One night, during his sophomore year of college, Smith broke down in his dorm room because he was struggling with a pornography addiction. He was angry and frustrated because he knew that pornography hurt himself, hurt his relationship with others, and hurt his relationship with God. He asked God why He wouldn’t just take away the desire because he knew it was bad, but he just couldn’t stop.
“I’m not going to take it away, but allow you to go through it so that you can help others who are going through it also,” Smith heard God say.
“What I came to find out was, a pornography addiction is a symptom of a deeper issue for me,” Smith continued. “Throughout my entire life, it was just not feeling like I was good enough. Feeling like I’m not good enough to even go to Him because mindsets that I had, feelings of unworthiness, felt like I’m not good enough. I believe I’m not good enough so I do things that reflect that. I feel like ‘I’m already low, why not just, you know, continue doing it?’”
“Even though I knew it was wrong, but I felt like I always had to be right, and perfect, and on point and if I wasn’t then that says something about my identity, which totally spoke into my relationship with God,” he added.
At that moment, Smith realized that God doesn’t always just lift us out of our circumstances and solve our problems, because if He did, then we wouldn’t have to depend on Him daily.
Smith started to dive into scripture and learn sound doctrine so he could be secure in his faith. He came to know that he was enough in God’s eyes and he didn’t have to prove himself as good enough for God.
He now works to spread positivity and light into the world through laughter. His uplifting content reaches an audience of nearly 1 million. In each of his videos, his goal is to help people see good in themselves and in the world.
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