Bill Myers is a Best-selling author who books and videos have sold over eight million copies, including his best known video series McGee & Me and the popular My Life As…and the Forbidden Doors book series which won the C.S. Lewis Honor Award and sold over 500,000 copies. His book, The Wager, was made into a film starring Randy Travis.   He believes that his values as a Christian direct “just about every step I take.”  And consequently, they have also limited his choices and his career to some degree.  “I think it has narrowed the field that I am telling stories in,” he said in our interview. “There is a built in resistance to the faith message in mainstream Hollywood and in mainstream publishing.  People get very nervous and worry that I might be preaching or possibly evangelizing, but all I really want to do is explore God.  That’s what drives me — wanting to explore different elements of God and a lot of mainstream media gets nervous about that. “

Like many people of faith Myers has sometimes encountered this resistance in a very pointed manner:  “I remember a meeting I had with a top manager.  He had a big office in a mighty glass tower on Sunset Boulevard.  I had met with him a few times and he’d been telling me how he was going to make me ‘the next Spielberg’ and I wondered if they said that to everyone.  Well, he was 80 years and not a believer of any kind, so it occurred to me that before he passed on I should maybe at least let him know that God loves him.  So I did and he thanked me at the time.  But then he called me back into his office about six weeks later and said he had reread all of my scripts.  Then he said, ‘Well Bill, now I know what you’re really about. I know we promised we would make you the next Spielberg and we will, we can do that,  just as soon as you get rid of this Christian shit, you’ll be on your way.’  Then I said, ‘Well, that Christian shit as you call it is kind of what I’m all about’ and he said, ‘I know that and you see that door right there?  You can come back in through it any time you want as soon as you get rid of it.’  To me, that was the quintessential statement that they were definitely not going to do what I wanted to do.”

Myers says that his values towards faith and family dictate just about everything he does:  “I mean I sometimes fall short of the bar, but I always have my eye towards the finish line.  It affects all of my behavior.  But it’s not so much rules and regulations.  I try to be careful not to use the word ‘religion’ because ‘religion’ often times tells us these are things you have to do whereas Jesus teaches ‘let me do the heavy lifting. You just abide in me and I’ll do the rest.’  I just abide in Him and He does the heavy lifting.  He changes me which is a far cry from religion which says I have to do it myself.  There is a big difference between being a religious person and being in love with God. My life all comes out of my love for God and as how that love continues to increase my love and respect towards people.  That starts with my family, my wife and kids, but it also goes into the workplace and everything I do.  Now some of those people may not be the way I would like them to be.  Some of them may be pretty far from that but still the deeper I fall in love with God, the more I love the things He loves, and that includes people.  And that means I try to treat them with honor.  It’s a bit like having your father-in-law living with you where, in that case, you would try to treat his daughter really well.  That’s hopefully how I behave not only around my family but also in the workplace.”

Myers maintains that this attitude is also the source of freedom. “This is where freedom is for me. I apologize if this sounds like a church service but freedom to me is knowing that even if I screw up big time I still know that I am loved and that God doesn’t see what’s wrong with me – He sees what’s missing.  It’s knowing that God is on my side, even though I’m a spoiled brat sometimes.  He is working to free me from the junk that’s attached to me.  It’s an ongoing process of being freed from the old Bill Myers and becoming moiré Christ-like.

Myers seeks inspiration from the Bible on a daily basis. “I spend about an hour a day reading scripture from the Old Testament and the New Testament and I also read some of the great mystics.  I don’t mean the crazy nut people but rather the people who were focused on the love of God as opposed to the rules and regulations.  So I find myself reading, certainly the words of Jesus and then people like St. John of the Cross and people like that who are just lost in that Love. I’m also a big fan of poetry.  As a wordsmith, when I read good poetry the words are so carefully chosen that they inspire me, not only to become a better writer, but also sometimes they cross that wonderful line between literal and something that seems like a higher dimension.”

Like many men of value, Myers is concerned about the direction of our society.  He sees some serious issues amongst the young adults and teens of today.  “I mentor a group of twenty-something kids and they tell me that they are so rudderless that they have lost the concept of right and wrong.  Everything is gray and there are no absolutes so they feel they are kind of out there flapping in the wind, trying to find what works and what doesn’t because our society has thrown out all the absolutes and they’re not sure which end is up anymore. “

Bill Myers says he doesn’t presume to know what all has to be done to make the world better but he does know what he has to do to better himself:  “I  can’t speak for other people.  I can only speak to the way that I feel I am getting better.  I find the more I focus on loving God with all of my heart and with all of my soul and with all of my mind and all of my strength, He does the rest.  He helps me live with less conflict, with people I’d normally be in conflict with, He helps honor and respect people I wouldn’t normally honor and respect and hopefully that love, as it continues to grow and continues to take more and more control of me makes at least my little sphere of the world a better place.”