Letting God

Last night I was watching Tyler Perry’s Diary Of A Mad Black Woman. I noticed that my Tivo had recorded it, and even though I had seen the movie about thirty times, I couldn’t turn the tv off. So, instead of getting ready for bed, and even though it was recorded and I could have watched it the following weekend when I had nothing to do, I had to watch then, though I decided I would turn the tv off right after Charles McCarter realized that the only person he would count on was his wife, the woman he physically dragged out of their home like trash while her replacement, his new girlfriend and the mother of his two sons, stood by, watching, and waiting to take her place as the new queen of the mansion. Just before his divorce to his wife, later on in the movie, he was gunned down by the gangster that he failed to get acquitted. He ended up paralyzed from the neck down. His girlfriend dropped him like he was hot, and the only person who would help him was Helen, his wife, the person he treated the worst.

I love that movie because of the acting of Kimberly Elise, who plays the pivotal role of Helen McCarter, the suffering wife. I will watch anything she is in. I loved the movie also because since I was a child my mother had drilled in my brain the bible passage of reaping and sowing, and that’s what the movie was about, reaping and sowing. At least that’s what I had enjoyed about the movie in the past. I love the idea of watching an evil person on tv or in movies getting his or her comeuppance. This time though, I saw something else. It surprised me that I hadn’t seen it before. This time I felt Tyler Perry was telling me about the importance of letting go.

Helen was telling her brother in law, attorney Brian Simmons (played by Tyler Perry) that she thought that by her doing all she could to make her bad marriage work, that God would do the rest. Brian told her that “sometimes it takes a lot more than doing all you can, that sometimes we hold on to things that God Himself is trying to tear apart.” That sentence alone spoke to me. I had seen this movie many many times before. Why am I just hearing this message?

And what is the message I got from the movie? The importance of letting go. There’s a saying that goes like this; “Let go and let God.” To "let God" from the center of your being, from your heart, from your innermost self where God speaks if you wish to listen -- that is truly the ultimate aim. Before this highest, most blissful and secure state can exist, obstacles and dualistic confusions must always be removed.

Perhaps it was meant for me to see that movie last night, because after that point in the movie, I felt as if it had served it’s purpose, and that I had gotten what I needed to get out of the movie. Who knows, what message I will get, when I see the rest of the movie sometime this weekend?