care for some porn with your coffee?

Straight up this is an article about pornography. I’ve been challenged recently in my life by this issue and by talking it over with a few close friends and members of my family am discovering that this is a bigger issue than my previously closed eyes allowed me to see. This discovery has pushed me to put my thoughts down for a few reasons including letting guys know that they’re not along in this and giving guys hope that there is a way out of the problem that you find yourself in. I figure that being able to put a face to a problem somehow makes it more real to people and somehow makes it easier to grab hold of.

I started out with the intention of writing a single post that would sum up my thoughts on the issue but quickly found that it was much bigger than one post could hope to sum up. In this day and age of the internet and the world wide waste of time the issue has escalated to greater heights with kids being able to access porn with the click of a mouse button, and more often than not unintentionally. Problem is once the claws are in, they’ve got barbs and are quite difficult to remove often leaving scars.

Analogies are my thing, as you would have discovered if you’ve been following my blog for any reasonable amount of time and this time it’s no different.

I’m a bit of a coffee lover. Not one of those “it’s gotta be just coffee, no milk, no sugar, straight from the beans” coffee lovers, but a lover of coffee because of what it does for me first thing in the morning. It has the effect of the full moon setting on a were-wolf in turning the monster into a human. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy a good cup of coffee when I drink one, but first thing in the morning (or at other desperate times) a cup of Nescafe Blend 43 goodness doesn’t go astray.

The normal method that I use to make said coffee is teaspoon (or two) of 43 beans worth of goodness, two teaspoons of sugar, hot water, then milk and stir. The amount of milk in the coffee will then determine how soon after I can actually consume it. Sometimes, however this routine is altered a little to the effect of two teaspoons of sugar in the mug, and a quarter to half a teaspoon of sugar in the mouth. Yeah, that’s right, I don’t have a problem with eating sugar every now and then. It just tastes so sweet in the mouth and at the time it really doesn’t seem like it’s affecting anything else. Problem is, after eating the sugar and experiencing the concentrated sweetness, the coffee that I’ve been looking forward to just ends up tasting bitter and foul. Not the pleasurable experience that it should be.

Nothing changed with the coffee, just the fact that the sweetener was consumed out of context. In this way sugar and porn are very similar. The way I see it, sex and all that fun stuff are the sweetener in a marriage. I know I sure as heck want a little sugar in the coffee of life when I get married because it makes being married taste the way it should. Thing is if I start to look at porn and get my sweetener elsewhere, when I come back to the relationship that the sweetener should be enjoyed within I end up with a foul taste in my mouth.

The terrible thing about pornography is that it doesn’t just affect me. It’s a bit like passive smoking in that one person enjoys the experience but other people pay the price for their actions. If I’m looking at porn then it doesn’t just affect me. It affects my wife (well, when I have one), my kids (when I have those too) and my friends and family. How does me getting a little pleasure out of looking at skin affect my wife? Well to quote “Marriable” by Hayley and Michael DiMarco

The more someone looks at porn, the more the person’s senses become deadened sexually (and the greater appetite they have for images that go further than the last ones viewed). While one might thing that porn can be compartmentalised in secret, married men who are honest will tell you that if you look at porn nightly, weekly or even once every couple of months, chances are your wife will look less and less attractive to you. And we can all agree that can’t be good for a marriage relationship.

To take that further, if it is affecting my relationship with my wife then if I have kids it can’t be a good thing for them either! They need to have a healthy example to follow of their dad being in love with their mum and that lead is endangered when pornography is brought into the picture.

This one has been focussed quite a bit on why porn is such a nasty and insidious thing and on it’s own would really leave people wondering if there is anything they can do about the addiction. It’s not a situation without hope, sure not easy to get out of but it’s do-able, so the next few posts are going to be focussed around the problems that I feel face guys who are wanting to kick the addiction and how I managed to get to where I am now. Sure, I still fall and stumble, and I have to be on my guard every day and night to prevent slips from happening but it is possible to do!

The best part is that even though we sin and fall God still picks us up and dusts us off and sends us on our way and if we want his help to kick the addiction then he will move heaven and earth to make it possible!

Heavenly Dad

The more I go through life and experience that which it has to offer, and give what I have to offer, the more I realise that My God is my heavenly dad. It’s interesting to know that the jewish word Abba, used sometimes to refer to God, means daddy as we would say it. An affectionate term of love between child and father. He’s my daddy in heaven, loving me, holding onto the bike after taking off the training wheels and yelling out encouragement when I ride down the hill after he’s let go, but always there to pick me up again and kiss my hurts better and set me on my feet ready to face the world again.

Part of this journey of realisation has happened very recently and it changed my view of God from the crusty old distant being who dictates in a booming voice those things that I shall not do, to the daddy and boy in the shed making stuff. The boys hand on the plane and the daddy’s arms wrapped around the boy guiding his hands and offering instruction and gently chiding when the boy makes a mistake. He never angrily punishes the boy for the imperfections of his inexperience but gently pushes him toward a better way.

The part of this journey that I’ve just been through is realising what the 10 commandments are all about, specifically what He’s getting at when He’s telling us not to covet our neighbours anything. (Deut 5:21). I have been guilty of this, of coveting my brother and sister’s families. I am blessed to have an awesome brother and amazing sister, both married and both with their first daughters growing up before me and making me a very proud uncle. They’ve both recently made it known that they’re expecting their second little whatsit in the not too distant future too, which is fantastic news and I’m ecstatic for them. The thing for me is I would love to be married and have a family of my own. A wife and kids to whom I can be a loving husband and daddy. I have to admit that it gets me down sometimes that I haven’t done that yet and that I can’t see it happening in the near future. Really when I get this way it’s pretty much me coveting what my brother and sister have in their families. Sure there’s probably some legit desire there, but it’s made worse by me looking at what they have and wanting it.

The realisation that the advice not to covet my neighbour’s, or in this case my brother and sister’s, stuff is a gentle correction, words of advice softly spoken in my ear to stop me from getting bitter and twisted inside. If you were reading the bible as re-written by me it would go a little something like this.

Don’t covet the fact that Tim and Jen are both married and have kids, that they’re settled and building their families, for you would not be able to do the things I have planned for you, like going to New Zealand at the drop of a hat, and (God willing) going back to uni and (again, God willing) joining the Air Force, if you too had a wife and kids. Don’t worry about your future, your dreams and desires are looked after, so get on with doing what I have for you now and don’t let comparing where you’re at with your brother and sister make what you’re doing now have a bitter after taste in your mouth.

I am so blessed in being able to do what I want to do when I want to. Being able to respond to phone calls on a Wednesday and be in New Zealand on the Monday after is something I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise. Sure it’s on my list that I want a wife and kids but I shouldn’t let that desire make what I’m doing now a bitter and twisted thing. God will give me the dreams and desires of my heart and it’ll probably surprise me big time when it happens, and when it does it’ll be a good thing.

There’s an upside to every situation, but in saying that it also means there’s a trade off. So I trust that my Abba Father has my best interests at heart when he gently scolds me for coveting my sibling’s families and get on with living the life of a single man, enjoying the upside of not being told off for burping and farting my way through life!

Wonderful

It probably shouldn’t surprise you that I’ve managed to pull a blog from a Doctor Who episode, but it’s probably not the way in which you’d expect. I was watching last weeks episode in which the Doctor becomes a man called John Smith to hide from some creatures who will destroy earth if they find and capture him. In order to hide he becomes human, and puts all of his gallifreian nature into a watch which stays hidden until it’s open at the right time. Essentially though, when John Smith opens the watch he dies and the Doctor comes back, but John has to make the decision.
The scene from which this quote is taken is just before the watch is opened when a young boy called Timothy, who was keeping the watch, is convincing John that he has to open the watch. Tim’s words are below.

I’ve seen him
He’s like fire and ice and rage
He’s like the night and the storm and the heart of the sun
He’s ancient and forever, he burns at the centre of time and he can see the turn of the universe...
...and he’s wonderful

It reminded me of the nature of my God. When digging into the bible you find that he’s not just some warm and fluffy benevolent being sitting up in heaven watching the goings on down in the world below. He’s not some judgemental nazi who smites and destroys because He can. Sure He gets angry and can wipe out a people in a single word, but He loves and that love is all powerful. I think sometimes, and I’m guilty of this myself, that we underplay who God is.

He’s wonderful! Look outside at the trees and the flowers and the birds, the animals, the ocean, the land and the sky. He made all of that just for our pleasure and to point us to him! The stars in the sky! We can’t understand why though! Why would God do what he did for me? Why would he send his Son to die for my sins so that I might be cleansed? If I could understand it, have the answer to that question I think I wouldn’t want to know! It’s something that I’m just going to have to learn to live with, but it’ll probably be the first question on my lips for Him when I meet Him in heaven!

It reminds me of another quote from one of my favourite books.
“He’s not a tame lion...”