Just when…

Just when I thought that things were going to get hard in the twelve step program I find myself at a step that I think I may be able to easily do.  Step six looks, at first glance, IMPOSSIBLE.  Why?  Because it is asking us to give all of our little sins away.  We, by we I mean addicts, are able to easily see and give up the thing that we admitted we were powerless to over come.  We were able with little effort to come to the realization that we needed help from God and others.  But there are things in our lives that are not big to us but are still robbing us of blessings.

I am not making much sense here am I?  OK Step six is:  “Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.”  What that means, as I said at first glance, is that we are asking God to make us perfect.  Is that really possible?  Jesus said in Matthew Chapter 5:48 to “Be perfect as you Father in heaven is perfect.”  Also we are not to do this in our own power or by our own will.  We are to do this by the power and will of GOD!!  Just like we did for the addiction we need to also do for the defects in our character that contributed to the addiction and will if not treated take us back there.  I am NOT going back there.

So how do we do this?  Step seven.  Step seven is: “Humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings.”  Humility, true humility is not humiliating or humiliation.  There can not be any of those things with God.  He is love therefore He will never humiliate us.  BUT He does expect us to be humble in his presence.  When we go to Him we need to be reverential.  We need to be in absolute awe of Him.  Should we bow before Him?  Yes that is humbling ourselves before Him.  Never should we approach God in arrogance.  Anger, grief, in pain, sorrow, happy, joyful, worshipful, praising?  Yes all of those are acceptable to God  when you approach the throne.

Arrogance is not the emotion or attitude you want to show some one in authority over you.  Humility is.  Humbly, truly humbly, asking some one in authority over you for ANYTHING is always the way.  Try some time to go to your boss and ask him or her to give you a day off.  Be humble and reverential and see if they are not at least apologetic that they may not be able to give it to you.  Then again they may just do it because you were nice to them.  But approach them in arrogance and see how far that gets you.  God has far more power and authority than any earthly boss.

So humbly ask Him to take all of those defects of character that have been plaguing me for years.  Hmmm that sounds like a very good idea.  I believe that I will do that.  FIRST though I have to find out what those defects of character are that need to be purged.  That is what steps four through six are for.  Step four is going to be a life long process that I will have to visit again and again through out the rest of my life.  Well I guess I better get started.  I need to do another inventory.

A Real (repentant) Man

I had this feeling…

The day before yesterday I wrote that the temptations had just been taken away from me.  I still believe that.  I am still working the twelve steps but my mind wandered in places that it should not have been while in the shower.  All I did about it was say, “NO leave me alone,” and got out of there as fast as I could.  I did not indulge in fantasy or continue to dwell on the thoughts that popped into the old head.  I got out just as fast as I could.  No sin just a temptation from the past sneaking in.  Where did it come from?  Why did it come then?

Well most of my sins were committed in the shower believe it or not.  My sins of the mind that is.  Thinking about all of the images or videos with which I had saturated my mind.  Only the Word of God can cleanse my mind of those things.  So when I was finished with my shower and dressed for bed I picked up my Bible and started to read.  I am in Philippians right now and I read chapter 3 last night before finally drifting off to sleep.  I turned off the light and got in the bed and slept the sleep of the just.  Not because I am just but because the peace of Christ is presently ruling in my heart.

I was talking to the L.O. yesterday and telling her about how I attended chapel and then when I came out of the chapel and got in the vehicle to go back to the office I was instantly back home in our car but no one was with me.  I was alone.  I did not have a house to go to and rest or do some small chore around.  I had no wife to sit beside me or talk to on the way back home.  I had no fellowship afterwards with my brothers in the Lord.  All I had to look forward to was going back to the stress of the job and dealing with customers and contentious employees of whom I am in charge.

I started crying right there on the side of the road.  I was feeling so lonely and sad and home sick that I just could not help it.  Was I feeling sorry for myself?  I really do not think so I was just feeling the intense feelings that come with having attended the peaceful service in the sanctuary and I had no one to share with.  I really miss home.  I know that if I leave here prematurely I will be going back to no pay like what I am earning now and that will not meet our goals.  I have six months at least to go before I get finished here.  Then $10/hour will do for me. 

Pray hard for me to make good decisions on this job and about the future of any thing else that I do.  Pray for a complete reconciling for my L.O. and I on our honey moon.  Also please pray for my children who are so far away and so far apart from each other.  Thank you.

 A Real (praying) Man

Things are looking up

When things tend to look there worst is usually when they are about to become the best.  While I am in no way out of the woods yet I have been given a kind of reprieve from the pain, worry, and stress of the past several weeks.  My L.O. and I are on much better speaking terms and I seem to be on the path to some relief in my job.  But the biggest relief seems to be in the area of temptations.  Now I know that I have been given a great gift in the Grace of God in this but I have to say, I do not feel tempted.   I mean literally I do not feel tempted at all. 

 I have been bouncing my eyes away from the sexual in the women that are around me.  I have been reading my Bible regularly although not as much as I would like to do so.  I have been shown how to walk away from conversations that I find to be repugnant.  I am working the steps every day.  I am on step six right now and it is a tough one.  I must say that the effort that I had put in to trying to stop being the person that I was and become the person I am was all wasted.  God did it in one minute when I just let him do it.  I gave my sin over to Him and it was gone. 

I really do not even know how to explain that in a way that will make any sense.  I asked Him to break this sin in me a while back.  He kept trying to do it and I kept fighting Him.  Finally I was given an ultimatum; give up the sin or suffer the consequences.  Those consequences were not any that I was willing to go through.  Then too I was shown the path to the 12 step program and a way to make myself over into a new being.  But not on my own.  I have help.  Real warriors who are praying for and talking to me about all that I was and now can be. 

My wife, my Lovely One, the one for whom I would lay down my very life now knows all of the truth and has started on the path to her own healing.  We are going to have that honey moon that I thought would not come about due to my revelations.  But now she says that she is looking forward to this.  There will be more bumps in the road but I really think that I have finally moved out of the valley of the shadow of death and into the light.  Things are definitely looking up.

Thank you to all who have been praying for me and my L.O.  Please continue to do so.  We still have a long way to go.

A Real (no longer in despair) Man

Yes it is!!

I have noticed that when searching for my BLOG some one several times has found me by asking the question, “Is pornography adultery?”  My answer used to be no.  Now it is not.  My addiction caused me to see things wrong, very very wrong.  I was blind, willfully blind to the fact that porn is a substitute for healthy sexual relations with your spouse and a very poor substitute it is.  Pornography will draw you into a web of sexual gratification that is very seductive.  It will make you think that you are the greatest lover in the world and that the orgasms you have are the best ever.  It is all a lie.

Your mind is put into the fantasy world where nothing is real and nothing is as good as you think it is.  The orgasm that you have leaves you very unsatisfied.  You may like the feeling of having it but there is no intimacy afterward.  There is no one to hold and no one to share a moment of afterglow with.  There is nothing but a vast emptiness that you are now desperate to fill with anything that you can find.  This lead me into more and more sexual “partners” in that I wanted to watch not just one on one but multiple partner sexual encounters such as two of one sex and one of another.  This graduated into orgies with more and more people. 

This eventually would have lead me into violent sexual images I am sure.  Thank God that did not happen.  This also took me to other places during my sexual relations with my wife.  Not into some areas but I thought about some of the things I had seen when we were together.  Some times this was to heighten the excitement and other times I could not orgasm myself without recalling those images.  Now I am trying desperately to purge my mind of these things.  I have made the decision to do this and I am renewing my mind with the Word of God. 

Make no mistake, porn is EVIL.  There is no other description that will fit.  Pure unadulterated EVIL.  It will lead you to do things that you never thought in your wildest imagination that you would do.  Depravity is its offspring, empty hearts and homes are its legacy.  Broken homes and broken marriages are it left in is wake. 

Porn takes many forms, not only movies and pictures.  There are erotic stories, strip clubs, scantily clad pictures of women in all sorts of magazines such as “Stuff” and even sports illustrated with their annual swimsuit edition.  In that magazine there are women who are only clad in paint, nothing else.  There are images of elicit sex on EVERY soap opera on TV.  Why are women attracted to them when they are repelled by the very THOUGHT of a husband committing adultery on them?  I think that women feel the people on the screen in all of their pain an suffering or lack thereof are inoculating them from the danger of those things.  There is no painless sin ladies and gentlemen.  All sin causes pain.

There are also things coming out of Hollywood that are just as vile and celebrated as “Best Picture” when they only deserve to be burned.  I have seen adultery in my home on the TV so many times that I have lost count.  Where did these images of adultery come from?  Some from the satellite or cable and others from movies I allowed into my home through DVD’S.  These are the things that were allowed so that I could have “peace” in my home. 

What were the results?  A thoroughly and completely addicted man.  Oh the images on the DVD’S were tame compared to what I had seen out there in the porno houses but they were just as evil as those that were explicit.  Would you like a few examples of elicit sex scenes?  Here are a few: “Maid in Manhatten,” Any James Bond movie, “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” Any movie with Angelina Jolie in it with the exception of “The Bone Collector.”  Doc Hollywood, is another.  Some of these movies only have upper body or full frontal nudity or a full naked back with only the suggestion of sex.  Some of these are a bit old but I have no modern movies in my possession at this time.  I do however have a movie that many of you may know and you may even like, “Going My Way,” as well as “White Christmas,” both with Bing Crosby.

Those movies are very old but they remind me of a time when I was innocent and clean.  I would give almost anything to feel that way all of the time again.  I only feel that way when I am watching movies like that or listening to Bing’s Christmas music.  I feel dirty all of the time now even coming out of the shower.  I can never be clean again until I stand in heaven before the great God and make an account for my life.  Only when Jesus steps up to the judges bench and tells the Father that I have had the penalty paid for by Him can I ever be clean again.

A Real (filthy) Man

Step 4 part 3

This step as I have said is not a one time thing but is a life time of looking at your life and the past sins and doing some thing about them.  You have to peel away the layers of denial and pain and dig, dig, dig for the coal that needs to be thrown upon the fire and purged out.  This is not an easy process to do and it is not going to be some thing that ends with the revelation of a few sins. 

My sponsor and I have been going over what I have all ready done and he has told me that I have come up with a very good evaluation even though I did not put it in the format he is used to seeing it in.  But that is OK for now.  I am going to redo it and try to see if the “chart” format will give me a clearer view of what I have seen so far.  What I have seen so far is not pretty.  Would you like a little taste of what I have seen?  Let me see if I can give you a little bit of what I have done without revealing too much.

People I have harmed:  Wife, Son, and Daughters.  How I harmed them:  Could have brought home an STD, absentee father to my children, and uncaring attitude towards the time I was wasting.  Review of our own sexual conduct: pornography, masturbation, and going to nude dancing bars.  Review of Fears: Did not want wife to EVER find out, STD’S, loss of job, embarrassment and humiliation of being caught in the lies of my sin.

These are not as deep as I have gone but as I have stated before I am not going to reveal my sins here.  But if you use your imagination I am sure that you can come up with some things that I have done.  What you have to do is look at you and see if there are any of those same behaviors in yourself.  Are there some things that you have done that you would have no one find out about?  I would be willing to bet that there are more facts about your life that you would NEVER reveal than you would like to admit.  If there are you are not alone.

Most of us addicts are very good liars or at least we are very good at taking advantage of the trust others have put in us.  I will give one example:  at three o’clock in the morning you are sitting in front of your computer screen with nothing on but your underwear or naked and your spouse comes to the door and asks what you are doing.  “Oh I just couldn’t sleep so I am doing a little surfing and email clean up.” 

No I wasn’t I was checking out all the free porn I could find.  Why did I not just rub her back and legs and try to get her turned on enough to have some good old fashioned monkey sex at three o’clock in the morning?  I will tell you why.  Because porn was easy and quick and gave instant gratification.  No rubbing, no coaxing, no conversation, no delays, and no rejection.  Also, it was and is my greatest drug.  I love porn and at the same time I loath porn. 

How is that for a contradiction?  I love and hate the some thing.  Why?  Because there is a war going on inside of me.  There are two sides to every war and this is what they are:  the flesh and the spirit.  I am sure you can guess which side loves the porn and which side loathes the porn.  But porn was not the only thing that makes up this addiction.  There are other things that I will not be going into at all. 

I have written enough for right now but there is more coming.  I am sure that there will be parts 4-?  However many it takes I hope that you will go with me on my journey.  There are still some things that have to be done to clean out some of the infection and there are places that I am going to have to go that are not going to be revealed here.  I will not shrink from this I cannot shirk my responsibility any longer.

Thank you and please keep praying.

A Real (digging) Man