Madea

At the ripe age of 15 years old, I watched Madea's Family Reunion: the play. I think my Mom bought the bootleg DVD off of some dude in the street that works near her job. The guy probably sold it to her because my Mom is a Christian so he probably thought that she would love it. So she bought it. And I watched it, and watched it, and watched it. I'm very much into musicals and plays so I loved watching it, but I also admired the character Madea and the way she dealt with situations. There she was, this man in a dress with wisdom and enough holy speech to make it acceptable and then just a little bit of those bad words that were acceptable to make it sound funny and cool. I embraced it full-heartedly. I remember thinking how cool Madea was and I started saying all her sayings. Hell and crap became words of frequent use in my vocabulary. Even the way I tell jokes or stories picked-up the tell-tale signs of Madea plays. I thought that this was acceptable to God and it was funny. But there are a couple of problems with this.

1) A lot of the things she does is for jokes. While it may be funny sometimes, some situations call for solemnity which is super hard for me to demonstrate because I've watched Madea, in which every situation is a chance for a joke.

2) Conflict resolution. Madea has guns. I don't have any and I refuse to buy some, especially if it's just to imitate Madea. Nuff said.

3) Twisted Wisdom. While Madea does give wisdom and she does say intelligent things, sometimes her wisdom is twisted by greed, which all contributes to how cheap I am. For, example, in a play about physical abuse, this guy was beating on this girl and Madea was willing to allow it to go on because of all the money he had. Twisted!

While I'm sure I could name a lot more things that is wrong with Madea and why I shouldn't have tried to imitate her at such a young age, I must tell you the instance in which it all came to a head. Last week, during a prayer session, it was my turn to pray but I did not know it. This chick hit me to notify me that is was my turn to pray and my need for vengeance went through the roof. I tried to hit her but I could not do it with my eyes closed. So I prayed. After the prayer session, I told her that I had anger issues and that you could not be hitting people in the middle of prayer like that. Very Madeaesque, wouldn't you agree? After wards, I struggled to figure out why I needed vengeance so much. God gave me the answer quite readily. I realized that watching things like Madea, even though she had been very influential in my life, was not helpful to me retaining a character that is like Jesus. Needless to say, I haven't watched Madea since. But that hasn't stopped me from still showing what I have learned at such an early age. Yesterday, I took this little girl (Pastor's daughter) outside ready to beat her and while I do not have the courage to beat another person's child, I was in full Madea-imitation mode and nothing was going to stop me from at least trying to beat this little girl's lights out. LOL, safe to say, I did not beat up the little girl but I did tell her she was rude and disgusting and then I told her mother that she told me Shut up and that she pushed me. In retaliation, she told her mother that I called her rude and disgusting. Of course, it was true but I apologized to her mother anyway and told her that I was not going to to tell her that she was rude and disgusting. In the end, my Madeaness did not gain much for me. I wish that I could pray away the anger and the angry words and wash away those plays and movies from my mind so that I could be pure.