Part 2: What was going on

That is what happened externally. Now I want to tell you what was happening internally. What might surprise you, and why this is important for you to hear, is that I was raised in a Bible believing Baptist home, and had even accepted Christ at the age of 15. I didn’t grow up in a single parent home, and wasn’t abused as a child. I saw my first pornographic image at the age of 9! By the time I was 12 I was engaging in sexual activity! I turned my life over to Christ when I heard a visiting pastor speak, but I didn’t tell anyone because those that knew me in church thought I was already saved and I didn’t want to disappoint them. Because of that, no one came to disciple me and within a year I was back to being promiscuous. You know what else is funny, and I mean that sarcastically, having a lot of sex in our culture makes you a man. If you drink too much or do drugs you’re a wasted life, but if you have sex too much, well, pin a medal on his chest because he’s just living life! That’s what the world says. That’s not the truth, though. The truth is that with all the sex came pain; emotional pain from sharing that intimacy and then losing it immediately afterwards, physical pain from the many fights and abusive situations it caused, and spiritual pain from the conviction of God for what I was doing. It was no different with pornography. 30 years ago, pornography use among men was drastically lower than it is today. Why, because back then the only way you could view it was to either go to a theater in full view of everyone, or pick up a magazine again, in full view of everyone. The pressure of embarrassment kept men moral. Then came the advent of VHS tapes. Now, you could view adult material in your homes, but you still had to go out and get them. But today, we have the internet. The world-wide web streaming information from one corner of the globe to another at rates of speed faster than anyone could have ever imagined. And with it came pornography. Today you can view any amount of adult material with a mouse click and a modem. No one will know and no one gets hurt. Yeah, right. The most recent studies show that the average male sees pornography by the age of 12. The largest consumers of it are males between 12 and 17.
I want to be perfectly honest with you when I speak, so let me tell you this as well. If you don’t already know, pornography is a gateway drug. You may have heard people refer to marijuana as a gateway drug that leads users to harder narcotics; well pornography is the same way. It starts with the usual adult material, fairly “normal”, but after a while, that doesn’t work anymore, so you seek out something different to excite you; until that doesn’t work and you go out looking again and again. Sin by its very nature is exponential. You open the door a crack and before long it’ll be blown off the hinges. Do you think I just woke up one morning and decided to talk about sex with a minor?! Not even close. Inside, it felt like I had a type of cancer. Every time I looked at pornography or entered a chat room, I would become excited and then leave feeling like I wanted to vomit because my soul was drowning in the filth of my flesh. I also discovered that the more pornography I viewed the less interested I became in sex with my wife. There was actually a clinical study done, and it discovered that the viewing of pornography diminished the release in the brain of a chemical known as oxytocin. Oxytocin is the chemical that drives men and women to hold each other and nurture each other, specifically after a man and wife are intimate. Do you hear what I’m telling you? Pornography literally erodes your ability to nurture your spouse! You won’t see that on the evening news.
So there I was, face to face with my wife; tears in her eyes, tears in mine. She yelled at me and I sat in silence. I was sure she was going to leave me and take our children (we had two at this point). She left the room, for what seemed like eternity, and when she came back she said an amazing thing, “We’re going to church on Sunday and we’re going to meet with the pastor.” There is a small church in Winchester Bay called Harbor Baptist Church, and its pastor at the time was a man named Dale Valovich. We had met him once before and really liked him. I immediately agreed. You see men, when I looked into my wife’s eyes that day, for the first time I saw not only who I was, but who she was. I saw that she was a gift from God into my depraved life. She had and would stand by me until death we did part and she meant it! I had put her through hell in our marriage. I never physically abused her but I’m sure the emotional scars she carries would scare anyone to look at. In spite of all I was, she STILL loved me! If there isn’t a better example of Christ’s love than that I don’t what is. It was at that moment that I knew I would do whatever it took to get right with her and with God. We began to meet regularly with Pastor Dale and attend services at Harbor Baptist. We met with him together, but I also met with him privately. He guided me through the Word of God, showing me where I went wrong and what I needed to do to be right. He showed me what the Bible says about being a husband and a father; what it says about treating your body as God’ temple, and it was there on the floor of his office that I cried out to God, “Please forgive me!!!” And you know what, He did.