Hollywood actor, director, and writer Tyler Perry, known for his “Madea” movies, said to “pray, work, believe, and repeat” after seeing signs to his eponymous studios on the highway in Atlanta.
In a Facebook post this week, he described the Georgian city as his “promised land.”
“I came here with nothing, lived off Sylvan Road, ended up homeless and starving, but I was always praying and believing,” Perry wrote. “I was always keeping the faith, knowing that if I worked hard, did my absolute best, kept my integrity, honored every blessing, and remained grateful through it all, that everything would work out.”
“And it has,” he added, “thank God.”
For those who are struggling to stay true to their faith, Perry pointed to Mark 9:23-25, in which the evangelist prayed, “I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief.”
“Even in my darkest times when I wanted to give up,” Perry wrote, “I kept believing, and I asked God to help me to believe past any naysayer, any doubt, and any problem.”
The Tyler Perry Studios founder recently credited God for his many successes. During a BET Awards Speech, Perry said the Lord “blessed” him with the opportunity to provide jobs to up-and-coming actors struggling to find work in Tinseltown.
“When I built my studio,” he said in June, “I built it in a neighborhood that is one of the poorest black neighborhoods in Atlanta so that young black kids could see that a black man did that, and they can do it, too.”
Perry also revealed the land on which his studio is situated used to be a Confederate base, “which meant that there was Confederate soldiers on that base, plotting and planning on how to keep 3.9 million Negroes enslaved.”
“Now,” he said, “that land is owned by one Negro.”