Love, Marriage and the Sex Trade
I remember the feeling. That room-spinning, heart-breaking feeling when I walked into my husband’s home office and found it… three open windows of video porn.
My heart sank as I realized that after just two short weeks of marriage, I was not enough. I was just …me. A middle-aged Christian woman who believed her husband when he said he was crazy about her and that she was all he ever wanted. In fact, I bought that hook, line and stinkin’ sinker. But, with the influx of the new information about my husband’s secret life, my heart was devastated.
As he walked back into the room and saw me standing there with tears in my eyes, his heart was devastated, too. What he had been hiding from me had now leaked out into our lives. It was ugly. It was embarrassing, and it was trying to take out our marriage.
What I believed when I found out about his addiction was that I was not valuable. I was ugly and I was simply not worthy of love. The real truth: satan was rearing his ugly head into our lives and he would stop at nothing to keep us from serving the Father and bringing others into a relationship with Jesus. His first step: wipe out our marriage…one in which we were feeling led to be partners in full time ministry by being missionaries.
Sadly, this disease of the heart had come into my husband’s life far before I had ever even met him. It invaded his life when he was a boy of just 12 years old.
It happened like it does every day across America. As a young boy, his father left dirty magazines in the bathroom…all within the reach of he and his brothers young adolescent hands. The pictures were the seeds of what he began to think a young man should want: loose women, willing to do whatever, with whomever, and bare it all for everyone to see. Perhaps in his 12-year old mind, if his father had those magazines and spent time looking at them, it must be ok for him to look at it as well. It didn’t take long before those seeds began to sprout, root and take over his life.
Very much like drugs, alcohol and gambling, pornography is an addiction. It wraps its scraggly fingers around the souls of men and draws them in picture by picture, thought by thought. It begins to corrupt the good in them and brings them to a level of secrecy, humiliation, degradation and desperation. Left to its own: It. Will. Kill.
Porn
As a wife, it hurt my heart. As a writer, it’s an ugly word. As a human, it’s an even uglier action.
It drags children into the child sex trade, women into prostitution and men into hell. It weakens one’s moral resistance, causes distrust and destroys families. Left to its own, it will steal, kill and destroy its victims… unless we step up to the plate and say “no more!”
More than ever, the statistics on pornography are staggering. According to www.Familysafemedia.com this epidemic is seeping into many homes, many businesses and many lives all over the world each and every second of the day.
Pornography Time Statistics
Every second – $3,075.64 is being spent on pornography
Every second – 28,258 Internet users are viewing pornography
Every second – 372 Internet users are typing adult search terms into search engines
Every 39 minutes: a new pornographic video is being created in the United States
If you or a loved one have been affected by pornography, you are certainly not alone. There is help and there is hope.
Follow up with my upcoming articles: Detecting and Protecting Your Family from Porn, XXX Freedom, and Forgiveness and Healing from Pornographic Addictions.
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