Will Smith only joined Instagram this year, but he’s already making headlines with his posts.
The actor and producer used the platform to express his faith in God, sharing it to his over 15 million followers.
In the video message, Smith talks about an important lesson he learned after going skydiving.
“Skydiving is a really interesting confront with fear,” Smith said before going into detail about his adventure. “So you get onto the airplane and you’re sitting there, you fly and you go up to 14,000 feet and the guy walks up [to the edge] and you’re looking down to death! Terror! They say on three … and you fall out of the airplane and in one second you realize that it’s the most blissful experience of your life.”
However there is a benefit when coming out on the other side of that fear.
“You realize at the point of maximum danger, is the point of minimum fear,” Smith stated. “God placed the best things in life on the other side of fear.”
On his Instagram, the two-time Academy Award nominee shares further videos about self discipline, failure, happiness and other life lessons.
While this is the first time he’s talked about God before in an Instagram post, he’s spoken about his faith in interviews before. He’s described how his grandmother was really who brought him to God.
“She was my spiritual teacher, she was that grandmother at the church, the one having the kids doing the Easter presentations and putting on the Christmas plays and her kids and grandkids had to be first. She was the most spiritually certain person that I had ever met in my entire life. Even to the point that when she was dying she was happy, like she was really excited about going to heaven,” Smith told The Christian Post.
In 2015, Smith worked on the film “Concussion” that dealt with religion. He played Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Christian doctor from Nigeria who became famous for discovering a link between concussions from football and their effects on the brain. Smith’s grandmother helped him better understand the Christian mindset he needed for the role.
Omalu said Smith had a religious experience after spending a lot of time with the Nigerian-born doctor.
“He spent time with me and he was very observant. And, in fact, he (Smith) had said what made him accept the role was meeting me,” Omalu told The Christian Post. “The spiritual stuff is deep. We met, we shared and we communed the love of God, and he also saw the light. The spirit of God also touched him.”