Joy edjeren: I don’t feel comfortable when I see my old movies
Former Nollywood actress, Joy Edjeren who became born again in 2012 has said she feels uncomfortable each time she sees her former movies where she performed different weird roles.
Edjeren made this disclosure in an online interview with Omolara Ayoola shared on her Facebook wall on May 23.
Before she gave her life to Christ, she had acted in films like Cage, Grooms Bride, Governors Gift, Game and a wide range of other films.
But transformation began in her life when she went to Ghana to shoot a movie and an unusual burden welled up within her. She had lived in a hotel for about eight months writing scripts and doing productions. But she became bored at a point.
Because of the boredom she began to have a desire to help the homeless, elderly and the needy. The desires were strange to her. She also began to have strange dreams. She went praying and doing all kinds of religious stuff to get her bearing.
At a point she began to desire to go to the US even when she had not finished her business in Ghana. She wanted to buy new dresses to fit into the roles she was to play in the films being produced in Ghana. She went shopping in the US. By the time she was through, she had lots of luggage and was prepared to go back to Ghana.
But a night before she was to return to Ghana, she woke up from sleep and found out she was struggling for her life. She started praying but the prayers were going nowhere. She called her sister living in Abuja who was born again and asked her to pray for her.
Her sister prayed for her and miraculously she began to feel better. At that point she heard a voice that said to her that “four or five was enough, go to your sister”. She later got to know that the voice was saying to her that the four or five movies that were already shot in Ghana were enough.
The next day, rather than prepare to return to Nigeria to see her sister as instructed by the voice she heard, she went to the hospital to check her health. The doctors said nothing was wrong with her.
She was confused. She stayed back in Houston, US. But the production crew in Ghana was putting pressure on her to come back. She went back to Ghana eventually due to pressure.
When she got to Ghana her condition deteriorated. She was being taken from one doctor to another. None of the medication she took worked. She could not participate in the movie being shot either. She eventually left Ghana to see her sister in Abuja in obedience to the voice.
By the time she got to her sister things took a miraculous turn. Within 24 hours Joy Edjeren who wrote a book to chronicle her life titled the birth and death of JJ Bunny stopped taking medicine and began to feel better. She started praying and began to read the word of God. She began to have understanding of what she was reading and was seeing all kinds of vision. Before then she could not read the Bible for more than two minutes.
She spent six months in Nigeria and became totally transformed. She had a lot of time to think about her life and the Lord opened her eyes to the fact that her former life would have taken her to hell.
When she returned back to Houston she had to change her phone number, broke up with things that would drag her back to the world.
She has since began to propagate the gospel of Jesus using different social media platforms.
She however said in the online interview that she had to go into isolation shortly after she gave her life to Christ in 2012 so she could understand her new found faith.
While noting that it was a good decision to go into isolation she said she probably would have gone back to the world if she was not well grounded in faith before coming to the public. Her time in isolation according to her enabled her to study more about God and have deeper fellowship with Him.
Edjeren who comes from Benue State Nigeria said her former life as Nollywood actress was really weird. But she experienced total transformation when she became born again
She began to understand that there is a spiritual consequence to everything that we do adding that “whenever I go back and see some of my old movies I feel uncomfortable. There is a way of the flesh and there is a way of the spirit. We appeal to sexuality a lot in Nollywood. But coming to Jesus has being a great blessing. Sometimes I wonder at myself how I could have been totally transformed.”
She noted that many young ladies have destroyed their lives through acting. Some, according to her “sleep around to get roles in films because of poverty and the desire to get instant fame thinking with the fame, money will come their way”