Stephen Colbert Shares the Moment He Decided to Follow Christ, Says, “My Life Has Never Been the Same”
“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert shared the moment he turned away from atheism and back to Christianity with America Media recently.
According to CBN News, Colbert was brought up Catholic, but at some point, he turned away from religion, believing that the God he was raised to believe in was not real.
That mindset would be flipped on its head, however, by a gift from a kind stranger one cold day in Chicago.
In a video interview with America Media in their Faith in Focus series, Colbert shares that when he was 22 years old, he was standing on a street corner in Chicago, when a man noticed him and gave him a small, green Gideons New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs.
Colbert told the interviewer, Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit priest, that he cracked open the frozen pocket bible to the glossary and turned to the first verse on dealing with anxiety.
“It was Matthew, chapter 5, it was the Sermon, ‘And so I say to you, do not worry, for who among you by worrying can change a single hair on his head or add a cubit to the span of his life?’ And I was absolutely, immediately lightened,” Colbert recalled. “For the first time, I understood the real meaning of the phrase, ‘It spoke to me.’ Like it read off the page, the words of Christ read off the page,” he continued.
Colbert said he stood on the street corner on that cold Chicago day until he read Jesus’ entire Sermon on the Mount.
“My life has never been the same,” Colbert stated.
Earlier in the interview, Fr. Martin asked the CBS host how he envisioned God to look.
Colbert said, “It’s Christ, it’s Jesus.”
He continued, “It’s not the old man with a beard, it’s not the Old Testament God. If you’re really looking for literal imagery, what I think of when I think of God, I think of Jesus, and then that image dissolves, because I then try to subsume that single image into the Trinity.”
Photo courtesy: Getty Images/Brian Ach/Stringer
Video courtesy: America – The Jesuit Review
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