Scrape with death led rebel to God – Father Stu

Father Stu

When Stuart Long crashed his motorcycle into a car, he was launched into oncoming traffic and hit the windshield of an oncoming car headfirst. Witnesses say he then rolled on the street and got run over by another car.

“And here I am” still alive, he remarked later.

Out of the death-defying experience, Stuart turned to God and became a priest, known as Father Stu. He’s the subject of a new biopic starring Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, who were inspired by the story and decided to make the movie.

The movie “Father Stu” will be released on Good Friday by Sony. Wahlberg has pursued this project for six years. His own father died of cancer, so when Wahlberg heard two priests talk over dinner with him about Stuart Long, it resonated with him.

Born in Seattle on July 26, 1963, Stuart Long was adventurous and ambitious as a young rascal he explains, according to the Daily Mail. After graduating high school in 1981, he arrived at Carroll College, a private Catholic university. His focus was completely on sports, primarily football and soon, boxing, which became his sole passion.

“I wasn’t Catholic. I always felt like kind of an outsider,” Long revealed while thinking about attending mass with the football team.

Long admitted to constantly questioning his college professors. When he discovered boxing, he found his calling.

Mark Wahlberg packed on the pounds to the play the portly priest.

“The individual sport fit with my personality better than the team sport,” Long said in a 2011 interview with the Diocese of Helena. Read the rest: Father Stu

Madea becomes ‘Atlanta Angel,’ as Tyler Perry shows true forgiving self

First he became Madea, the gun-touting granny ready to even any score. Then he became the “Atlanta Angel,” paying for the groceries of seniors at 70 supermarkets during the Covid crisis.

Tyler Perry — the flamboyant actor, writer, producer who’s earned hundreds of millions in Hollywood –has footed the bill during senior shopping hour at 44 Kroger stores in Atlanta and 28 Winn-Dixie stores in Louisiana, as reported by Huffington Post.

The elderly got receipts signed by the “Atlanta Angel.”

Because Covid panic-buying has left senior citizens trampled, jostled, sidelined and shortage-stuck, some national chains are offering special hours exclusively for the elderly. Perry, who was born and raised in Louisiana but now lives in Atlanta, took advantage to underwrite their grocery bills.

Senior citizens also are more vulnerable to the lung-impacting virus.

“We would like to join our customers in thanking Mr. Perry for his kindness and generosity during this unprecedented pandemic,” says Felix Turner, Kroger’s Atlanta manager of corporate affairs. “Our customers were filled with joy and gratitude.”

Perry became a Christian out of a childhood of abuse. He was physically and sexually abused inside and outside his home many times, according to BeliefNet.

“I remember (my dad) cornering me in a room and hitting me with this vacuum cleaner cord. He would just not stop,” Perry says. “There are all these welts on me, the flesh that’s coming from my bone, and I had to wait for him to go to sleep. When he fell asleep, I ran to my aunt’s house, and she was mortified when she saw it.”

Another time when he couldn’t get the bolts off the car tire because they were rusted, his father beat him severely.“All I remember is him tackling me, and I remember holding onto a chain-link fence so tight, my hands are bloody and he’s hitting me.”

While his Dad was vicious, his mother was a shining light.

“My mother was truly my saving grace, because she would take me to church with her,” he says. “I would see my mother smiling in the choir, and I wanted to know this God that made her so happy. If I had not had that faith in my life, I don’t know where I’d be right now.”

When he decided to put his faith in God, he also needed to learn to forgive.

“I am a Christian, I am a believer, and I know had I not been a person of faith, I couldn’t be here in this place, and I wouldn’t be walking the path I’m on now,” Perry says. “And I think the greater good of the path I’m on now is to teach people to learn to forgive and move on, in a way that’s done through the healing power of humor.”

He wanted to break into Hollywood and from 1992 to 1998 he tried to stage a show entitled “I Know I’ve Been Changed.” But the morality play about forgiveness in dysfunctional families flopped continuously until it was re-shaped in Atlanta and had a successful run that ignited his career.

His big breakthrough came with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” which saw the creation of the salty Madea personality played by Perry himself. Madea is the gun-brandishing elderly lady who takes justice into her own mean hands. She’s not a Christian character but is a vehicle of humor to introduce Christian themes.

Madea, who has reappeared in movie after movie, is something of an alter-ego for Perry because she doesn’t forgive: “Well when you gettin’ got and somebody done got you and you go get them, when you get ’em, everybody’s gon’ get got,” she told Dr. Phil. Read the rest: Tyler Perry Christian.

The Rock now looks to the THE ROCK

Before he became Hollywood’s most bankable movie star, Dwayne Johnson got smacked-down by life — arrests, evictions, family suicide attempts, football failure, divorce — and the concurrent depression drove him to God.

“I have my own special relationship with God, you know, and I certainly, I feel very blessed. I count my blessings, every day,” the retired WWF wrestler told the Gospel Herald.

The monikored “Rock” has learned to rely on the Real Rock.

Both his dad and maternal grandfather were wrestlers. Dwayne Johnson grew up in Hawaii, son to a black Canadian father, Rocky Johnson, and a Samoan mother. There was instability in his home, and he was getting arrested over and over — for fighting, theft, and check forgery. Then his mom got evicted, and mom and son were forced to leave Hawaii.

The rude awakening injected in him a measure of sobriety. He decided to turn his life around and turned to football. Working hard, he earned a scholarship as a defensive tackle at the University of Miami. He eventually graduated with a degree in criminology, but his dream was NFL stardom.

After going undrafted, he moved to Canada and tried out for the Calgary Stampeders and slept on a stained mattress he found in the trash outside a sex motel. He subsisted on Ramen noodles for two months into the season.

“The first ‘rock bottom’ that I hit was out of college where I worked for 10 years from the time I started playing football at 14 years old to the time I was 23…and did not get drafted,” he told the Tribune News Service. “I played in the CFL (Canadian Football League) for approximately 200 bucks a week Canadian. I got cut from the team a couple of months later, and I had to close that chapter in my life.

Having to face the death of a dream, with $7 left in his pocket, he returned to his father’s house in Tampa, Florida.

“It’s a tough experience when you have to move back in with your parents. And at that time, my parents — we never lived in a home, they had a little small apartment in Tampa, Fla., and I had to move in with them. And then you go through the challenges of that. You hit depression.”

Against the wishes of his dad, who struggled to provide for the family as a journeyman wrestler, Dwayne launched a career as a professional wrestler. Unlike his dad, he was a blockbuster success as a trash talker with an ebullient personality. The audiences of the late 1990s and early 2000s loved him, and “The Rock” raked in huge ratings, earnings and championships for WWF.

After eight years, he turned to acting with a big splash in The Scorpion King in 2002. He followed up the initial modest success with a string of career-killing family movies. What was happening to the Herculean action movie hero?

My career was a little shaky – really shaky,” he told Rolling Stone.

A return to wrestling was an unthinkable admission of failure.

“What the ____ did I do with my career?” he wondered at the time.

In 2007, the always confident action man lost the confidence of his beloved wife, and the couple divorced. He submerged again into depression.

“Around 2008, 2009, I was going through a lot of personal ____ that was really _______ me up,” he told People magazine. “I was just struggling, man. Struggling to figure out what kind of dad am I gonna be. Realizing I’d done a piss-poor job of cultivating relationships, and a lot of my friends had fallen by the wayside. I was just scared.”

Out of the darkness, he found God’s light. Read the rest: Dwayne Johnson Christian.