Terry Crews is Superhuman — Because of Jesus
By Movieguide® Contributor
AMERICA’S GOT TALENT host Terry Crews is opening up about his troubled past and how God gave him a “superpower” — the ability to find strength in vulnerability.
“The pastor didn’t preach about God’s love and grace,” Crews recalled about his childhood church and how he got his first view of God. “Instead, he preyed on his congregants’ shame about their weaknesses and their fear of hellfire. What I learned was that you didn’t ever cross God. His wrath and judgment came quickly. I wanted to hide from God. He was even scarier than my earthly father.”
Crew’s real father struggled with alcohol and addiction and often abused Crew’s mother.
Movieguide® reported:
“One of my earliest memories was of seeing my father, drunk, knock my mother to the floor. This happened regularly. Even so, I was considered lucky by neighborhood standards because my father was around and didn’t beat us kids,” Crews recalled in a Guideposts article.
Despite this, Crews said that he loved his father, whom he called a “hard worker and a good provider,” and tried to build a bond with him but to no avail.
As a child, Crews’ father admonished him if Crews tried to connect with him. So he tried to toughen up.
“Getting tough meant getting bigger,” said Crews, who previously hosted the annual Movieguide® Faith and Values Awards Gala. “I loved art. I would sit at the kitchen table and draw superheroes with bulging muscles. I dreamed of becoming strong and powerful like that.”
He threw himself into building up his body, and then “muscles” became his superpower.
“Somehow, I knew my father would go too far one day, and I would need to be strong enough to take him out. No boy should have to grow up thinking like that, but at the time, I didn’t know any different. It was my reality,” the actor said.
When the actor met his wife, Rebecca, in college, they got married a year later and went on to raise five kids.
“I spent seven years as a journeyman player in the NFL, a lonely existence that reinforced I could never show fear or weakness. Vulnerability and pro football don’t exactly mix. My career dictated where our family lived,” he said.
“I thought as husband and father I should dictate what we did. The one thing Rebecca insisted on was raising our kids in the church. In every city, she’d find a church for our family to go to. And I’d go. For her and the kids,” he explained.
Eventually, Crews became a security guard on sets in LA. With encouragement from Rebecca, he auditioned and landed his first role in BATTLE DOME.
One Christmas, Crews let his kids stay with his parents. His dad promised not to drink while they were there, but he didn’t keep his word. He got in a fight with Crews’ mom and punched her.
When Crews came in the house and found his dad, he said, “I’m grown now,” I told him. “And you will never lay hands on my mother again.”
“Then I punched my father in the face. Hard. Years of anger were bound up in that fist,” he recalled.
But when he saw his father on the ground, he didn’t feel like a superhero.
“I’d dreamed of this moment, how good it would feel once I showed how strong and powerful I was. How I was in control now. But all I felt was empty. Hollow,” he said.
“My dad wasn’t the only one crying,” he continued. “I bawled like a baby, full of shame and remorse. I’d never felt so vulnerable than at that moment, worse than when my dad had shunned me all those years before.”
When Crews got back to LA, he was acting similar to his dad. He didn’t hit his kids or wife, but he controlled them “just the same.”
As his success grew, the worse it got.
“One day in February 2010, I was on location in New York City. Rebecca was home in L.A. We were arguing on the phone, and I finally broke down and told her everything I’d tried to keep hidden, emotions I didn’t even understand why I was having. Primal fears of vulnerability and loss of control that my muscles could no longer conceal,” he said.
“I love you, Terry, but if you don’t get help, I don’t see us working this out,” Rebecca said and hung up.
Crews had hurt Rebecca deeply. He told her he had cheated on her ten years earlier and had a serious porn addiction. But he wanted to make it right. He went to therapy, got advice from a pastor and developed a relationship with God.
He said, “I went to Rebecca at last and said, ‘I want to start over. I want to change.’ I got on my knees. ‘I’m sorry. I had it all wrong.’ Then, humbly and sincerely, I asked her for forgiveness.”
And she did forgive him. She believes forgiveness is essential to a long-lasting marriage, and she still valued him and her marriage enough to do it.
Rebecca told PEOPLE, “You cannot hold grudges and stay together.”
The couple just celebrated their 35th anniversary last month.
“For most of my life, something like that would have been an unbearable humiliation. Now I work every day to become a better husband and father,” Crews said.
“I have discovered strength in vulnerability, for who was stronger and yet more vulnerable than Jesus, who loved the poor and weak and defied the Pharisees. Who sacrificed his earthly life so we could live with him in heaven. What requires more vulnerability than to forgive and be forgiven? Well, I’m working on that.”
“I remember that love conquers fear—always—and that to be a man means accepting myself, weaknesses and all. That’s my true superpower,” he said.
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