Actress Patricia Heaton offers her view about The Purpose in Life.

On a recent appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the three-time Emmy award winner and actress Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond, The Middle, Carol’s Second Act) explained how glorifying God rather than herself led to her successful acting career.

The Ohio native, started off her interview bragging about her father, Chuck Heaton, covered the Cleveland Browns for fifty years reporting for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. She attended many sporting events, including the Cleveland Indians and the Cleveland Browns. She joked that being a Browns fan was much like being a Catholic, “it builds character, you know, to follow the Browns…suffering. It goes with the Catholicism.”

Heaton was raised as a devout Catholic. One of her proudest moments was her fourteen months of sobriety, stating it affected her thinking and speech.

While attending Ohio State University, she became a sister of Delta Gamma Sorority. She later graduated with a bachelor of arts in drama. In 1980, Heaton moved to New York City to study with drama teacher William Esper. Heaton made her first Broadway appearance in the chorus of Don’t Get God Started (1987), after which fellow students and she created Stage Three, an off-Broadway acting troupe.

Heaton stated that at the beginning of her career, God “shut every door.” She mentioned that when it was her time to go to Los Angeles to begin her acting career, it was detoured towards a missions trip.

Heaton said that “the first month I was there I went to an orphanage in Mexico with a Church.” She continues, “When I came back, I had a huge sense of peace that I never had before. I realized that I had been making the acting career the center of my life. You know as a Catholic, that there’s only one thing that can be the center of your life, and that’s your faith.”

“I wasn’t doing that, and I think God was withholding that until I made sure that He was the center of my life and not the career.” She focused on her faith in God and not her career because she believes she “can’t rely on those things because they don’t last. You have to know that the purpose of your life is glorifying God with your life, not glorifying yourself with your career.”