I turned 30 a few weeks ago. It doesn’t seem like a big number, but it’s been messing with my head. I’ve been thinking about my life a lot more this year. Is my job fulfilling me now? Am I saving enough for retirement? What will my legacy be? Will I do anything worthwhile in this world before I’m gone? Pretty standard stuff, I suppose.
I’m also questioning whether or not I’ve done anything valuable for the kingdom of God with my time on earth. I’m not looking to have a ministry or anything, but I’ve begun to feel over the past few years that God is prompting me to share my story in some way. This blog is the best I can muster up for now. I don’t even know where to start, but I’m going to give it a shot.
The best-kept secret in my life was my struggle with pornography. It was the one thing in my life. You may have a thing too. It’s that part of you that you wish you could change, the addiction you wish you could beat, the subject you struggle with that saps the joy from your life. I often thought, “if I could just be rid of this addiction, I could be the best Christian there is.”
I was raised in a Christian family that attended a very conservative church. In fact, we weren’t just church attendees, we were a family of musicians who traveled far and wide, singing in youth rallies, church camps, Sunday worship services, evening concerts, conventions and so forth. I’ll get into more of my backstory in the future, but all you really need to know right now is that we were constantly performing in front of other people. I was in church of course, but we were “ministering to others” from the platform more often than we were “ministered to” ourselves. I really didn’t develop any relationships with a pastor, Sunday school teacher, youth leader, or even peers my own age.
As I grew, like every other preteen or teenage boy, I was curious about sex. There weren’t a bunch of dirty magazines laying around the house or anything, but I relished the days when a JCPenny ad came in the newspaper. Not Sears, only Penny’s — they showed more women in their underwear. I saved the ads and hid them a few times.
Even though my family traveled nearly every weekend, my siblings and I attended a public school. My family was probably considered to be a little odd due to our outward appearance and some of the denominational standards we lived by, but on the whole, we were pretty well accepted.
When I hit middle and high school, it was the early 2000’s. File sharing programs were all the rage, and I began pirating some music here and there like most of my friends. Amid all the music and media that was at my fingertips, I found porn. I didn’t have to look for it. It was literally just there. It was free, and I was curious. It didn’t matter what I had been taught or told, I was totally sucked in.
I waited anxiously for days when I might be left at home alone, and then I binged. I would sneak out to the family computer in the living room late at night after everyone had gone to bed. I was “good with computers” so I knew more about covering my tracks than my parents did. We even had an internet filter, but it only affected the browser, not the file-sharing programs.
Don’t think for a moment that I was happy or proud of myself. I absolutely hated myself. I had asked Jesus into my heart over and over and over again since I was a little kid. I went to the altar at church and camp meetings and all kinds of services. I heard the “hellfire and brimstone” sermons. I shed tears of sorrow, remorse, and shame. I was absolutely sincere. I begged God to take the desires away from me. Was I even a Christian? I would watch some porn, act accordingly, then immediately ask God for forgiveness. I had to make sure things were cool between God and me, just in case I died in my sleep that night, or if Christ returned unexpectedly. It was a terrifying and exhausting way to live.
Don’t think for a moment that I was happy or proud of myself. I absolutely hated myself.
This habitual cycle of sinning and apologizing to God went on through college, and it got worse. I was consuming some pretty twisted stuff, and I had more freedom and opportunity than ever. I watched porn every chance could get. The things I watched when I first started weren’t enough to keep me interested. I was always looking for something else, something more.
Don’t misunderstand me: I continued to fight against the addiction. A couple months clean here, a few weeks there. At one point in college, I went for a year and a half completely porn-free. I wanted to be free — I just didn’t know how to get there!
We didn’t talk about porn at my church. Porn was one of those taboo subjects that just wasn’t appropriate. My family started attending a more open-minded church in the early 2000’s, but even there, porn wasn’t something you just started discussing with everybody.
I couldn’t talk to anyone. I thought my dad would be angry, and I thought my mom would be hurt and disappointed. Besides, while my father was doing his best as a Christian, he had plenty of his own issues. There were a lot of behaviors and actions in my home that didn’t seem to be very Christ-like. If what I saw was all part of the Christianity we were presenting on stage, it sure didn’t jive with what I read in the Bible. Even so, I felt like I needed to be perfect for the people that came to see us perform. They needed to believe that the Gospel we were peddling was legitimate. I can’t explain how debilitating this was for me. You might be tempted to think, ‘well, it’s just porn… it’s not like you were having some kind of sordid affair. It’s not like you killed anybody’. You have no idea. I saw our family as having to be perfect witnesses for God. In our conservative religious circles, there was no room for pants on women, beards on men, or even short sleeve shirts. In my mind, there was certainly no room for moral failure.
By the way, if you don’t think admitting that you’re a porn addict to others is a big deal, why don’t you go ahead and make a public statement at your church next Sunday? Let me know how that works out for you.
What if people found out? Ok, no, we weren’t exactly Casting Crowns or the Gaither Vocal Band, but we performed for thousands of people every year. There were a lot of individuals who had a great deal of faith in our integrity. What would they think if my secret ever got out? It sounds really ridiculous and absurd to me as I write these things now, but it was such a shameful topic in my early years, I truly believed that if anyone ever found out, it would ruin my reputation and reflect badly on my parents. Maybe people would stop asking us to perform in their churches.
I didn’t ask for any of this. I didn’t ask to be put on a pedestal in front of people every weekend. I never wanted to be a music minister. We were sharing my dad’s testimony (which is a great story, by the way), but if it had been up to me, I would have stayed home. We sang all these wonderful songs about God, but I was a fraud. How could someone so addicted to porn be a Christian? Would I ever find deliverance?
Continue reading with part two.