Friends star Matthew Perry says that he turned to God when he realized his drug and alcohol addiction had nearly killed him.
According to CBN News, in his new memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Perry, who played Chandler Bing on the NBC sticom Friends, said he finally asked God to help him.
"'God, please help me,' I whispered. 'Show me that you are here. God, please help me,'" he recounts in his memoir.
He continued, "As I kneeled, the light slowly began to get bigger and bigger until it was so big that it encompassed the entire room … What was happening? And why was I starting to feel better?"
Perry said he started to cry.
"I wasn't crying because I was sad. I was crying because, for the first time in my life, I felt OK. I felt safe, taken care of. Decades of struggling with God, and wrestling with life, and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion."
"I had been in the presence of God. I was certain of it. And this time, I had prayed for the right thing: help," Perry said.
Perry said he went to rehab 14 times and had some 15 stomach surgeries. He tried detox treatments more than 60 times.
About five years ago, he overdosed on opioids, which caused his colon to burst and led him to have an extended stay in the hospital.
"I was given a 2 percent chance to survive the night," Perry told HBO's Bill Maher. "They didn't tell me that, obviously, because I wasn't really there, but they told my family. And I was put on a thing called an ECMO [Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation] machine. … They call that a hail Mary. … Five people were on ECMO that night, the other four died, and I somehow made it."
After spending around $9 million on treatments and hospitals and losing some of his teeth to the drugs, Perry said that he believes that God rescued him from his addictions.
"God had shown me a sliver of what life could be. He had saved me that day and for all days, no matter what. He had turned me into a seeker, not only of sobriety and truth but also of him," Perry wrote.
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Frazer Harrison/Staff
Amanda Casanova is a writer living in Dallas, Texas. She has covered news for ChristianHeadlines.com since 2014. She has also contributed to The Houston Chronicle, U.S. News and World Report and IBelieve.com. She blogs at The Migraine Runner.
