Be Free From Pornographyعينة

True Satisfaction is in God

My first year of college, away from my parents and my strict Christian upbringing, I felt like I discovered freedom for the first time. I believed God was blessing me with this newfound freedom because of how righteous and pure I had been growing up. So I gave myself to pushing the limits of my freedom as much as I could.

It’s incredibly easy to think you are free when you don’t understand what freedom really is. It’s incredibly easy to think you have found something when you don’t know what it is you are looking for.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. I had friends, exciting adventures, parties, and unrestricted access to movies and video games. Yet I still thought, If I can get more, then I will be satisfied. If I can discover more freedom in life, then I will be complete—then I will be happy.

Although my morals were slipping, and the way I treated people was changing for the worse, I still could justify everything I was doing. I still thought that my good outweighed my bad.

One night, everything changed.

A weight of an increasing loneliness joined forces with the predominant idea that I still needed more freedom. So, I began to look at porn. For most of my life, I had prided myself in being pure, but now something had changed. After the “partying” was finished, after the activities were over, and after my friends had gone to bed, I was awake. I fed my eyes with images of nude women who had been paid to expose themselves indecently.

At first, I viewed it as just a slip up. Everyone makes mistakes, I reminded myself. Then it happened again and again. I continued to ignore the thought that it would affect me in any real way. It took a while but I eventually began to realize I was not the same person I had once been. I had not just messed up; I was a mess up. I had not simply given in; I had given up. I had not only said yes to something wrong; I had also said no to everything good. Little did I know, the only Person who really is good had not given up on me. Jesus was about to reach out His hand and offer me true freedom.