Still Growing: An Autobiography (17 page)

After that horrific incident, the studio decided to install metal detectors through which the fans and audience would have to pass. The whole situation had so freaked me out that I wanted to test the new machines to see if they really worked, so I went into the Craft Services
kitchen and got the biggest butcher knife I could find. I slipped it up my jacket sleeve.

When I got to the detectors, I smiled at the security guards. “Hey, boys. How’s it going?”

“Fine, Mr. Cameron,” one replied as I breezed through the metal detector. It didn’t even make a peep.

On the other side, I turned around and said, “Oh, guys . . . I forgot to give you this.”

I pulled the butcher knife from my sleeve.

They gasped and said unrepeatable things. Shocked and embarrassed, they couldn’t believe I had gotten through.

I laughed nervously, hardly reassured. “Yeah . . . I feel much safer now.”

I
s there more? Have I peaked? Is this it?

Just as everything in life seemed to be going my way, I started to ask myself deep, probing questions.

My father’s financial dreams and visions of independence were what emotionally motivated him for the long haul in life, and by those standards, I had already arrived. I was a bit miffed. I was 17 and had already surpassed what most people hoped to achieve in a lifetime.

The disturbing part was that it all felt very empty to me, kind of like biting into the big chocolate Easter bunny: It looks great on the outside, then
pop!
—hollow on the inside. Or like looking forward your whole life to meeting Santa Claus and then finding out that he’s just an out-of-work fat man in a polyester suit.

I felt that I would have traded it all for something else, but what the “else” was, I had no idea. It was kind of depressing. I always thought being rich and famous would make me infinitely happy, but it didn’t.
Weird
.

What did I have left to look forward to? More money? More fame? More admiration? Was the rest of my life gonna be more of the same? Was the American dream of health, wealth and prosperity a sham—as phony and make-believe as a Hollywood façade?

There was this gnawing in my gut, insisting that something was missing.
There must be more to life than this
, I reasoned.
Is there a God? Is there a heaven? Have I been wrong about these things?
If there wasn’t anything but
the here and now, then nothing mattered but having a good time.
Let’s eat, drink and party hard till the lights go out. If death is the end of the road and life is about getting what I’ve already got, then let’s get busy living life wide open till we die
.

Peggy Lee’s 1969 hit “Is That All There Is?” sums up what I was feeling in 1987: “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing, let’s break out the booze and have a ball . . .”
¹
Where was this song when I needed it? Maybe it was on the flip side of a record Dad had glued together.

While every other teenager wondered how they could bag a babe every Friday night, I had no idea why I was preoccupied with loftier questions. I had no idea what a “soul” was, but I was getting the sense that if I had one, mine obviously lacked something. At first, I figured I could forget about my questions by masking them with a relationship with a woman. If I could just find the right one, maybe
that
would satisfy me and fill the emptiness I felt inside.

Where would I find such a girl? I needed someone who wanted to get to know the real me and wasn’t just excited about the status of being with Kirk Cameron, Teen Heartthrob. Where would I discover someone not caught up in the superficial? L.A. didn’t seem likely. Perhaps Alaska. Or East India. Some place where women were too busy surviving to watch situation comedies.

The idea of “God” felt very silly to me. I was conditioned to believe in atheism. It was what I had always been taught in school as a kid. My science teacher didn’t believe in God and anyone with half a brain was an atheist, too—or so I thought. It just seemed so rational, so smart. I was an individual—a free thinker. It was like,
See? I’m not some stupid, vapid TV star. I’ve thought things through, and I say, “There is no God
.”

I had friends who had faith in God and spoke of “Him” as the most significant part of their lives. That troubled me. I felt sorry for these small-minded plebeians, who were obviously victims of religious brainwashing. I didn’t hold it against them; I just pitied them a bit. As far as
I was concerned they could worship Bigfoot, as long as they didn’t impose their fairy-tale beliefs and archaic morality on me.

But the big questions wouldn’t leave me alone.
How did we get here? Does it really matter how I live my life? Does anyone really care? Could there be a God? What will happen to me when I die?

I must have been asking my spiritual questions out loud, because a set designer gave me a book she promised would change my life. It was called
YOU
. The title appealed to my self-centered psyche. It explained that I was God and that the power of the universe resided within me, and that I just needed to recognize my potential and embrace it.

I read it, but in the end I couldn’t buy into that philosophy. I had trouble making rice that didn’t clump together, let alone create my own universe. Besides, if
I
was God, then why didn’t I know that I was God? Why did it take a paperback to clue me in?

I knew the reason I was “important” was simply because I was on a TV show that made a lot of money for a lot of people. It was all about what I did and what I could do for them. As soon as teenage girls were done with me, my agent would be done with me. And so would Mary Hart and John Tesh. And so would
People
and
TV Guide
.

My “power” was as thin as wet crepe paper.

I did take a few ideas away from that self-help book. I figured that if belief in a god helps one feel better about life and get through the day, it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or not, or who he/she/it is or what one calls god. I decided to experiment with that philosophy to see how a “god belief” would make me feel. I liked the concept that a god could be anything I wanted it to be. I was like the writers in the
Growing Pains
writers’ room: Just as they pulled stories and characters out of thin air, I could do the same in my creation of “god.”

I thought my god should have a name, and figured that
what
you call god is not important. I had always liked the name “Mark.” It had a nice hard
K
at the end of it. So just for yuks, I named my god Mark.

Around that time, I met a very pretty girl on the set. She was one of a set of triplets, which, I know, sounds like a story begging to be turned
into an episode:
Mike tries to date triplets simultaneously, but learns a valuable lesson about deceit
.

But no, I just dated one of the sisters. She was a sweet girl who eventually invited me to join her family for a trip to church. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to go. But I accepted the invitation—not because I was interested in religion, but because I didn’t want to offend her family.

It was a big church. The head honcho was a man named Chuck Swindoll. He had a booming voice and spoke with authority. I listened as he read from a Bible, which I thought was nothing more than a book full of rules designed to suck the fun out of life. This pastor began to share the biblical description of God in terms I had never heard before, in a way that grabbed my attention and dazzled my intellect.

He spoke of God’s omnipotence: God is
all-powerful
. He talked about God’s omniscience: He is
all-knowing
. And he addressed God’s holiness: He is
morally perfect
and, therefore, He alone defines what is good.

I spent a lot of time thinking about those things.

I knew that while Earth seems huge when you’re in an airplane, the truth is, it’s just a spec in comparison to the sun. And the sun is a relatively small star in our huge galaxy. The big ones are many times larger and occupy billions of other galaxies in the universe. The universe is so huge that we have not yet found the outer edges. If God created all this and sustains life on Earth—the only place that has life as far as we know—then how powerful and intelligent must He be? The thought was mind-boggling to me.

I later heard a scientist explain that Earth is basically a large rock being hurled thousands of miles per hour around a ball of fire we call the sun. If the Earth were to break from its orbit just a fraction, we would either burn up or freeze to death. “If no one is in charge of this whole thing, we’re in trouble,” he said.

Then he added, “If Someone
is
in charge of this whole thing . . . we’re in trouble.”

That Sunday morning at church with my friend’s family, I thought,
If God is real and eternal, and made everything out of nothing as the Bible says, it makes sense that He also knows every piece of His creation intimately. That means there is nothing He does not know. God knows not only what’s at the outer
edges of time and space, He also knows who shot JFK, and the details of the secret love lives of the fleas on the back of every cat. That means He also knows every thought and every intention of
my
heart
.

The most sobering statement I heard that day was that God was “holy,” absolutely good. He abhors evil, which meant that I might be on the receiving end of some anger and wrath. After all, my secret thought life and private actions betrayed my image as the squeaky clean role model everyone believed me to be. Apparently, I was a “sinner.” The Bible made it clear there is a stubborn, selfish streak that runs deep in the heart of every person. It shows up when we lie, steal, fail to love God, dishonor our parents, are greedy, hateful, and so on.

Dr. Swindoll spoke about heaven and hell, and immediately followed that up with talk of God’s mercy and love. He explained that God, in His kindness, provided a way for sinners to be forgiven of their sins, washed clean, changed and made new. He spoke about the value of grace, repentance and faith.

I was blown away. I felt like someone had unloaded a theological dump truck on my head. These were not the words of the irrational, big-haired, crazy loons I had seen on religious television, swindling Social Security money from senior citizens desperate for a miracle. Dr. Swindoll wasn’t promising health, wealth and prosperity in exchange for a donation to his ministry, but rather freedom from God’s wrath and a relationship with the Creator of all things. Swindoll appeared totally sincere in his beliefs and genuinely concerned about the welfare of his hearers.

I left the church with a long list of questions. My date’s father did his best to answer them and then turned the tables on me, asking me pointed questions that caused me to examine my own long-held atheistic beliefs. He then suggested that I read Josh McDowell’s book
More than a Carpenter
, which turned out to be the first intelligent essay I’d ever read about God. Up until then, God had seemed like nothing more than a mythical creature lumped in with a different trinity: the Easter bunny, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

I continued visiting that church, seeking an answer to the huge question of God’s existence. To me, it became the most important
question I could answer.
If there is a God, a Creator, a supreme Being who created all of this, the implications are HUGE!
The existence of God would certainly answer my questions about where I came from, what I was supposed to be doing here and where I was going when I died. But the enormity of the task overwhelmed me.
How do I go about this? Where do I start?

I began reading the writings of men whose intellect I respected. To my shock, I found that many historical heroes believed in God, such as Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Copernicus, and others. I later found that even champions of atheism such as English philosopher Anthony Flew had converted to belief in God, partly based on Einstein’s conclusion that a supreme Being must exist.

To be fair, I also researched the other side of the debate. To my surprise, I found that even Charles Darwin, the man who popularized the theory of “molecules-to-man” evolution operated within a framework of belief in God.

Despite my confident denial of the existence of God, I began to seriously question if I could be wrong. I often parked on the top of a hill at night, gazing out the window of my car, in awe of the countless stars in the sky. I tried to comprehend not only how far away the stars were, but how they got there in the first place. I sat for hours contemplating how this tiny, fragile planet we live on could be so perfectly balanced that it supports such a vast array of life forms, from huge elephants and whales to tiny hummingbirds and insects. I wondered what laughter is and why it feels so good to laugh with a friend. Even though I couldn’t see love, I knew it was a priceless treasure and wondered if anyone or anything had created it. Why were sunsets beautiful? Why did the birth of a baby make adults cry with joy? I had so many questions that begged a meaningful answer, but for so long, I wasn’t willing to critically examine my atheistic beliefs. I had been blinded by my own pride. I had been unwilling to look up and ask God for the answers.