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What Sparked Adventure Enthusiast Bear Grylls’ Faith? 

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

What Sparked Adventure Enthusiast Bear Grylls’ Faith? 

By Movieguide® Contributor

Discovery Channel phenom Bear Grylls’ faith is his strength.

“I always had a really natural faith as a kid where I just kind of knew God existed and it felt very free and pretty wild and natural and it wasn’t religious,” Grylls told CBN Europe. “But then I went to school, and suddenly I kind of became much more religious, and I kinda thought, ‘Well, I don’t like this,’ and it was all about church-going and people telling you not to smoke behind the bike shed when you’re age 12. I thought if that’s God, maybe I’ve got the whole kind of deal wrong, and I kind of ditched my faith.”

It wasn’t until the death of one of the most important people in Grylls’ life when he was 16 that he went back to his faith.

“I think age about 16, I lost my godfather, who is like my second father to me, who lived with us, so I was super close,” he explained. “And totally out of the blue, it was a real shock to me, and I remember just having wanting to pray to Him and not knowing how to. I remembered sitting up the street and saying a very simple prayer that said, you know, ‘Will you be that friend to me that you were when I was like 5 and 6?’ It felt natural. That was actually the prayer of finding faith.”

READ MORE: BEAR GRYLLS BAPTIZED IN JORDAN RIVER: ‘ALWAYS A DREAM OF MINE’ 

Grylls went on to explain that faith is a continued journey of “not letting too much in the religious stuff” because that “clouds the heart of faith.”

“It’s about being loved. It’s about being forgiving. It’s about finding a home and those are great things that all of us need,” Grylls said.

Grylls, who served for three years in the British Special Air Service, found fame as a survivalist on the Discovery Channel. Faith, he says, is his greatest survival tool.

“Like a fire steel or a length of good rope, my faith is another essential in my arsenal for survival,” he said. “But it is so much more. It’s my backbone, the heart of it all, the greatest source of any strength I have.”

He’s combining faith and survival in his upcoming THE CHOSEN series, THE CHOSEN IN THE WILD.

“What we’ve tried to do with THE CHOSEN IN THE WILD is get to know the real people and show their real journey,” Grylls told the Christian Post.

“Isn’t that the same with THE CHOSEN? It shows the real reality of what Jesus was like in their relationships and their journey. … It’s the element of faith I’ve always responded best to and not the fluff of it all, the rules and the regulations and the do’s and the don’t, but actually, as THE CHOSEN shows, as Jesus shows, ‘Keep your eyes on me, you’ll be OK. Then you won’t sink in the water.’ I felt that in my own life many times, through many adventures. It feels like a really special pairing to bring the best of RUNNING WILD to THE CHOSEN and to allow fans to see their favorite actors in a way that they never do normally.”

READ MORE: BEAR GRYLLS TALKS TAKING THE CHOSEN INTO THE WILD


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