Chris Pratt is Hollywood’s golden boy. A family man, the class clown and an action hero, the star of Guardians of the Galaxy and Passengers seems to go through life with a self-assurance most of us dream of, but this was not always the case.

Before the age of 21, Chris found himself wafting between part-time jobs, study and homes. Living on the Hawaiian island of Maui, he was just getting by. It was here that he encountered a man who led him to faith in Christ.

 “I was sitting outside a grocery store—we’d convinced someone to go in and buy us beer. And a guy named Henry came up and recognised something in me that needed to be saved. He asked what I was doing that night, and I was honest. I said, ‘My friend’s inside buying me alcohol.’ ‘You going to go party?’ he asked. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Drink and do drugs? Meet girls, fornication?’ I was like, ‘I hope so’,” he recalls in an interview with Vanity Fair.

“I said, ‘Why are you asking?’ He said, ‘Jesus told me to talk to you…’ At that moment I was like, I think I have to go with this guy. He took me to church. Over the next few days I surprised my friends by declaring that I was going to change my life.”

While life for Chris hasn’t been easy, his faith now sustains him through the ups and downs. In fact, after his son was born nine weeks prematurely in 2012, the experience further shaped his faith in Christ.

“We were scared for a long time, we prayed a lot,” he told People magazine. “It restored my faith in God, not that it needed to be restored, but it really redefined it,” the actor says. 

If Chris Pratt’s life shows us anything, it’s that life is unpredictable—but God always finds a way to reach us, no matter where we are.

Which is why it’s beautifully ironic that when Chris just tied up filming Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, he was in Hawaii—the place where his faith found its own origin story.