Darkness and bondage. There are not two better words to describe the way I felt for a period of about ten years. I was raised in a good Christian home, the youngest (and subsequently favorite) of three children. My dad was a Southern Baptist Pastor. My mom was my Sunday school teacher for most of my childhood. My parents held genuine, authentic relationships with Jesus. Their faith was on display more than just on Sunday mornings, it was a full-time experience for them. I walked the aisle of our church when I was seven or so. How could darkness and bondage be the words that described me for nearly ten years?
Those words came to control my life when, as a young boy of probably twelve or thirteen, I was given a magazine that I knew I shouldn’t have. From the moment I opened it, my bondage began. Bondage is defined as “the state of being a slave.” That definition hits right on the nose for me. For the next ten years I experienced a kind of slavery I never even knew existed. I became consumed with these images and finding as many of them as I could. Now, this desire to find and view these images was in blatant opposition to everything I had seen and been taught by my parents and everything I knew about God. This created an internal conflict that can only be described as anguish. Because I knew this was not the right thing to do, I hid it and pretended it didn’t exist. As it turns out, this only deepened my bondage. You see, as a preacher’s kid you aren’t supposed to have problems, particularly of this sort. Since I did have these problems, that meant there was something wrong with me and I certainly couldn’t share this burden with anyone else. The bondage produced such guilt and shame which only forced me into more secrecy. I knew I had to keep this problem in the dark.
I had battled this problem on my own for years, finding small moments of success. Maybe I could “win” for a few days or a few weeks, occasionally even a few months but I always ended up right back in the same places I wasn’t supposed to be. I could not leverage enough discipline on my own to truly quit. I had hoped the desire would just go away. At the ripe old age of nineteen, just a few weeks shy of my twentieth birthday, I married the love of my life and figured that would be the nail in the coffin of this problem. For several months, it was. But then it returned, the guilt and shame too. I continued to battle, unsuccessfully for another year or so until the night I had spent the last ten years fearing finally became reality. It was the night my wife called me while I was at work and said, “I was checking the internet browser history….” I was caught but I didn’t admit it. Instead, I called my wife a liar and I accused her of not trusting me. I was rude to her; I was hateful to her, and it was starting to work. By the end of our conversation, I had convinced her that it wasn’t me, it must have been someone else who left that history. I should have felt relief when that call ended, but instead I felt the chains of bondage and the depths of shame and guilt intensify to a level I had never known nor could have ever imagined. I couldn’t bear it any longer. It was finally time to come clean, to bring this addiction out of the darkness and into the light.
The funny thing about darkness is that it isn’t a thing unto itself but rather it is simply the absence of something else, namely light. Truly, the definition of darkness is “the partial or total absence of light.” All of these years I had been held captive and living in darkness on account of my refusal to let the Light shine in this area of my life. The Light that I was missing was not from the sunshine or a lamp but rather was the Light we read about in John chapter 1, “In Him was life, and that life was the LIGHT of men. The LIGHT shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.” Freedom from my slavery and light in my darkness were available to me! I confessed my sin to my wife. It was a painful experience for both of us yet because of it, the light began to shine, and the darkness began to flee. Darkness always flees before the light. The two cannot coexist. There is either darkness, or there is light. God began, on that day in 2005, to shine light in my darkness. It was a slow process. I was discovered in 2005 and it was not until sometime in 2006 that I viewed pornography for the last time. I was not granted immediate cure for my ailment but what I was granted was of so much greater worth. God began to call me into deeper and more meaningful relationship with him and the deeper I went in that relationship the less I desired pornography. When the Light of God began to shine on the darkness of my addiction, the chains of bondage were forever shattered. Because of that, I am able to tell people all the time that I was hopelessly addicted to pornography but by the power of God I have been walking in FREEDOM since 2006. You can know this Freedom. You can know this Healing. You can know this Hope. You can know this Light. His name is Jesus.
I cannot thank Light of Life films enough for helping me to share my story and I am beyond thrilled that God has laid upon their heart to make the film unDefiled to shine the Light of Life into the darkness that is sexual sin and addiction. Please, go see this film. Share it with your friends. Share it with your family. Share it with your church. Together, with the attention the film will bring to the topic and the resources available with it and by the power of God we can shine the Light and take back our friends, families, churches, and communities from the bondage of addiction.
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