Spring Cleaning for the Soul

For the past four years this post has remained as a document on my computer. The document was labled "DO NOT OPEN." But, at last it's time to face my past and shed some light into the dark corners.

At first there is a thrill, a sense of accomplishment and above all the feeling that I got away with something that I shouldn’t have. You almost feel like you’ve conquered the world but the only problem is you can’t tell anyone about it. But, as you move past the first experience onto the second and beyond all the excitement fades as the shackles of addiction tighten their death grip.

I was around the age of 14 when the lures first began to appeal to me. It started off as swimsuit magazines and biker magazines in my local grocery store. They did not usually have any nudity and so they were not covered or in special wrapping and so as a young teen I had access to them. Then after revealing my interest in such material to a friend, I was shown my first pornographic magazine. It was the summer of 1993 and I had been spending a lot of time with an older friend when he showed me a Playboy magazine he had bought. At that point my innocence was gone. After that summer I lost a lot of my contact with the guy who showed me the magazine and for about five years I stayed away from pornography but allowed some lust to dwell in my mind.

Years later I was a twenty year old Bible college graduate when my next experience took place. It was typical fall afternoon in my hometown on the Saturday I went shopping to pick up one of my favorite artist’s new album. Little did I know that choices I was about to make would alter my life. After buying the CD I began the drive back home. I don’t recall if the thought was already in my mind or if it was during the drive that it came to mind but either way it set into motion a series of events that I would do almost anything to take back. I remember stopping at a gas station with intentions of browsing their magazines but the excitement, and fear, overcame me and so I quickly bought a candy bar or something and left without making any other purchases. But my curiosity had been peaked and I had already purposed in my heart to go through with my thoughts and so I made a second stop. My heart was pumping so hard that I am sure those around could hear it as I purchased my first issue of Playboy. It was the college girl’s edition for 1998. Once I was back in my car I took the magazine from its wrapper and made sure none of the post card advertisements inside fell in my parent’s car to leave a trace of what I had acquired. I was back on the road and headed towards home when I began to think that I couldn’t take the magazine into my parent’s house so I had to look at it and destroy it before I made it home. I remember stopping on a side street, in my hometown, and looking through the magazine for a few minutes and then continuing on until I made a second stop at a little gift shop. I sat in the parking lot flipping through the pages until a title of an article caught my eye. It was written by a pastor talking about the harms of pornography addiction (to this day I’m not sure why Playboy had the article in it). I read the entire article and felt very dirty and decided it was time to get rid of the magazine. I put the magazine inside of a plastic bag and threw it out in a garbage can outside of the deli and drove home. My guilt stayed with me for a little while but as time went on it began to fade.

Time slowly passed until my sister was given a computer that she brought home. After a little while we had the internet and it was only a matter of time until my curiosity got the best of me and I was looking up pictures of Pamela Anderson. The funny part is that I never found her all that attractive. Yet still I looked. At first I stayed away from any nudity, but then I gave into to nude pictures but only of females. As time went on soft-core pornography was losing its appeal I started searching for pictures of couples (male-female or female-female). I was working a few jobs at the time, and was getting next to no sleep, but it didn’t keep me from spending time online when I got home from work online fulfilling my desires.

In the spring of 1999 I was home alone as everyone else had gone out of town and I rented my first pornographic movie. It was soft-core, because I didn’t want to risk being seen at a real porn shop, so I got the movie from Blockbuster. I watched the movie almost two complete times that night after I got home from work and I watched part of it again the following day before returning it. By the time I rented the movie I was starting to admit that I had an addiction but I still was enamored by the whole secrecy and so I wasn’t willing to talk to anyone about it.

Skipping ahead a couple years, I started back to college and while I continued to have a problem with lust, my porn viewing had all but stopped. I had not stopped over a great awakening or out of moral concerns, but rather do to the fact I lived in a dorm, had no transportation and I was smart enough not to look at pornography on the schools computers. In the summer of 2001 I went back to New York for the summer. In the first month of the summer I quickly picked up where I had left off before and was spending an hour or more searching porn each day. After being home for a month, I started working with a Christian ministry for the summer and some sense of moral responsibility persuaded me not to look at porn during the weeks, but instead Friday and Saturday nights would have to suffice. I kept up with the pattern all summer long until it was time to return to school.

Living in an apartment off campus that fall gave me some opportunities for pornography but I did not have internet access and so I had to stick to the R-rated movies that the town library had. The occasional movies were all I had until I got a car in January of 2003. Other than the first Playboy I bought in 1998 and a few Penthouse magazines in New York, I had only stuck to free porn until the winter of 2003. Over the months that would follow I bought several Hustler magazines at a liquor store (I drove about 30 minutes away from where I lived so it would be less likely to be spotted).

In the fall of 2003 I moved into another apartment and my rollercoaster of pornography picked up momentum. That fall I bought a few more magazines, and for the first time I bought DVD’s. They were soft-core DVD’s, once again I did not want to risk being seen near an adult only store, and so I bought the most risqué videos I could find at a music and video store. In addition to the magazines and videos, my pornography viewing on the internet gained momentum and before I knew it I was looking at it for upwards of two hours a day. I was only working part time and my room mates were all in school so I had a lot of free time and I would lock my door and search and search.

When I moved in January of 2004 into my fourth apartment, I determined that I was going to change and for a month or two I did a fair job. In March I drove down to visit my sister in Alabama and on the trip down I passed several strip clubs and adult book stores and even though I did not stop they set my mind on breaking my commitment of staying away from internet porn and when I got back to Ohio. From the end of March through the summer I spent hundreds of hours viewing online pornography as well as watching R-rated soft-core porn movies from Blockbuster and another video store. What had started out as curiosity years earlier had spurned out of control and with no end in sight.

I cannot continue on with this addiction because I know it is not only ruining me but also a future marriage if I do get married. I do not want to carry this burden alone but so far I do not know who I can trust to share this load with. Someday soon I hope to find someone who will be willing to walk along side me and help me bring my personal life and my spiritual life back to where it should be and help me to realize that I do not need to be a slave to this any longer.

I wish I could say what I’d written described rock bottom, but I can’t. A few months later my viewing habits had spiraled out of control and I got to the point where I downloaded a hardcore porn movie from the web. That night God broke my heart. I don’t remember exactly how it happened but I remember that I started crying, while the movie was playing, and I turned it off. God showed me several things that night that started me on the road to recovery. He showed me that what was being shown was a cheap substitute of what He created as something special.


Looking back, nearly five years after I left off writing, I am dealing with mixed emotions. Now a married man, most of the time –with God’s help, I am able to keep my past lust problems under control. But there are times when my sin nature gets the best of me. Why do I risk what is real, my relationship with my God and my wife, for what is a cheap imitation? While God is helping me deal with past issues, and making me into the husband and father He wants me to be, I still have a lot of growing to do. At the end of the day I can’t help but recall the lyrics to a song I’ve grown to love: “I can never take a chance, of losing love to find romance.”

“Create in me a pure heart, oh God.”