Tom Hanks’ Son Chet Shares How He Was ‘Touched by the Hand of God’
By Movieguide® Staff
Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson’s son, Chet, was an avowed atheist until he encountered the Lord.
Chet shared his testimony in a recent video posted to YouTube. Be advised, the video does contain some foul language.
Chet said that as an atheist, he was at a point in his life where he was very angry and very resentful before he went to a wilderness camp.
One morning, the counselors woke him up and took him on a hike.
What he saw on the hike changed his life.
“I went off and sat on the edge of this cliff and was just looking out at the view,” Chet said.
“As I was looking out at that view and I was looking at where I had been from an elevated perspective — because I’d been stuck in this desert for 12 weeks and it just looked ugly and boring, and there’s nothing to look at. But now I’m looking at it from an elevated perspective of the top of this mountain.”
The new perspective started to creep into his heart.
“So I’m looking around, and I’m so overcome by emotion. It felt like I was touched by the hand of God. It was at that moment God revealed Himself to me,” he said. “All that anger, and that hate, and that resentment flipped. It inverted to just infinite hope, gratitude, peace, love.”
Chet began to weep
“It just flipped on a dime, like that. And I was so overcome by emotion, I just sat at the edge of that cliff and I wept. I wept for an hour, uncontrollable weeping for like an hour. It did not cease, but tears of joy. Tears of everything, feeling every emotion at once, all the pain and all the joy.”
Chet said that the drugs he’d tried up until that point didn’t even come close to the way God made him feel.
“That was the birth of my spiritual life,” he said. “I knew there is something else out there, OK? There is a higher power, there is higher intelligence because it felt like it had just tapped me on the shoulder.”
The video interview ends there, but the Hanks family has been open about how faith has impacted their lives.
“God is a part of our life. Every single day, I prayed to God for I don’t know how many years that he would bring me somebody that I loved, that loved me in the same way, and he brought me Tom, so I believe in that,” Rita Wilson previously said.
Tom Hanks stars in multiple movies that have been nominated for Movieguide® Awards this year.
Both GREYHOUND and NEWS OF THE WORLD have been nominated for Faith and Freedom Award® for Movies, Epiphany Prize® for Most Inspiring Movie and Best Movie for Mature Audiences. Hanks is also nominated for a Grace Prize® for his role in GREYHOUND.
Tune in to The REELZ Channel on Easter Sunday, April 4, at 4 p.m. ET for Movieguide®’s Movies That Inspire to find out who wins and see more of what God’s doing in Hollywood!
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