Matthew Perry Shares with Fans What Led Him To Pray for the Very First Time
Do you remember the first time you prayed to God?
Matthew Perry remembers his first prayer. He shared it in an interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC News.
“God, you can do whatever you want to me, just please make me famous.” On his knees, Matthew uttered what he now looks back on as a “dumb prayer, like the prayer of a really young person.”
Then, as MovieGuide Magazine states, “God answered Perry’s prayer — his role on FRIENDS made him a household name. However, drugs and alcohol soon turned his dream into a nightmare.”
#FRIENDS #friends25 #TV #SerieTV #25anni Lisa Kudrow Phoebe Buffay, Matthew Perry Chandler Bing, Jennifer Aniston Rachel Green, David Schwimmer #RossGeller, #FriendsCast #Geller, Trova i tuoi amici#TrovaAmici – https://t.co/JRdIR9biFN #FRIENDStv #friends_25 #amici #Friend pic.twitter.com/FNwPNKABEY
— LinkiAmici Radio (@LinKiAmici) September 22, 2019
Matthew opens up about his life in his new memoir, “Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.”
He grew up with famous, but divorced parents.
Perry’s father, John Bennett Perry, is an actor best remembered for his “Old Spice” commercials and his mother, Suzanne Perry, was once the press secretary for the former Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau.
Matthew was included in their lives but always felt on the outside, a sense of not belonging.
At fourteen, his first experience with alcohol provided Perry a way to feel good, and that was the start of his lifelong battle with addiction that fame couldn’t cure.
He talks about having a “dark day” when he realized fame didn’t deliver what he thought it would. It didn’t “fix what I knew was broken.”
“Friends” star Matthew Perry, on an intense tour for his memoir, shares his story of addiction — repeatedly https://t.co/4uIGdAUna9
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) November 14, 2022
When the Israelites wandered in the desert after God delivered them from Egypt, they complained about living on manna and prayed for meat.
God answered their misguided prayer saying, “Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you shall eat. You shall not eat just one day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole month, until it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to you” (Numbers 11:18-20, ESV).
That is similar to what Perry experienced in having fame but being unable to enjoy it because of what remained broken.
Perhaps now, Perry is beginning to see the light of Jesus. God’s light will fix what is broken inside better than the footlights of stardom.
The Christian Post reports, “Now on the other side of his addiction, an excerpt from the end of Perry’s book says, ‘A light has been shown as if to a desperate man who needs help, the same light that hits the ocean and the sunlight and the beautiful gold water glistening.'”
‘People who don’t believe in that, I’d like to tell them to go stop a wave or go make a plant,’ he told Sawyer. ‘It’s not fun to talk about this stuff. I don’t like talking about it, but I know it’s going to help people to talk about it, I know the book is going to help people.'”
When God answers our prayers, that’s not the end of the story. He continues to pursue us and invite us into relationship with Jesus.
God wants to save us completely. We pray Matthew finds that healing in Christ.
