Iyanla Vanzant on Oprah: Fasting, God, Barbara Walters (VIDEOS)
These videos show Iyanla Vanzant on Oprah talking about everything from God to fasting to Barbara Walters trying to steal her away from Oprah and change her hair.
“The public first met Iyanla during season 12 of The Oprah Show, that was back in 1998,” said Oprah as she introduced Vanzant once again to us all these years later, reminding us just how much we loved her back then.
There was a big falling out.
“We didn’t speak for years,” said Oprah, introducing Iyanla and her new book — another one I won’t link to as a Christian, because her Yoruba beliefs at the crux conflict with mine, being that Jesus is The Way, The Truth and The Life and that no one comes to the Father God but through Him.
But chew the meat and spit out the bones, as one person just wrote on Twitter.
The most fascinating thing about Vanzant on Oprah was how much of a misunderstanding happened when Iyanla was fostered and nurtured by Oprah — with the talk show queen turning over her stage to the woman who’d endured so much as a child and single mother — and then was wooed away by Barbara Walters.
“Diane [Hudson] and I both left that meeting like whoa…’What was that?'” Oprah said about developing Iyanla’s own show around the same time that Dr. Phil’s show was being developed.
Vanzant had been fasting and praying for seven days, and told Hudson and Oprah that this was the “anointed time, not the appointed time,” so Oprah backed off and told Iyanla to go in peace basically.
Iyanla claims that the “somebody big” that she told Oprah had offered her another deal ended up being Barbara Walters, a woman whose company was initially turned down — but when Harpo’s people thought Vanzant was backing them against a wall, ended up giving Iyanla a $1 million deal.
That show turned out to be a disaster — a show with the $27 million budget that didn’t give Iyanla her own office, and with people who hadn’t read her books, folks who told Vanzant her natural hair style was too hard, the lines and edges to hard for TV.
It ended and that was that.
It’s deeper than a recompense for looking a gift horse in the mouth. Iyanla said she wasn’t ready to recognize all that grace that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (as we know Him) was giving her at the time.
She was confused, and let people treat her badly.
It’ll be interesting to see what Walters says about this on The View today. My TV is going on at 11 a.m. to look for Barbara’s rebuttal.
Iyanla’s conversation with Oprah was so good, she’s coming back on Wednesday, February 23, 2011, to finish up.
Mmmm… will Oprah give Vanzant her own spin-off show now? Hopefully it’ll be a Christ-approved one.
