This summer I learned how to fly fish. I’d fished the way most people fish all my life. Put a worm on the hook, toss the line in the lake and wait for a nibble. Fly fishing couldn’t be more different from that. Your rod and reel are different, the way you cast is different and there are no worms. You don’t sit in a boat or stand on a dock. You’re actually in the water with the fish. When you fly fish you feel much more like a hunter stalking your prey. You have to be very observant and you have to listen carefully to what’s happening on the river and you have to be patient. All of this wouldn’t help you though if you used the wrong type of fly (bait). Your fly has to mimic the type of bugs that the fish expect to see floating on the water. And your fly better look pretty close to the real thing or the fish won’t go for it. Your fly tricks the fish into thinking it’s real a bug and BANG it takes the bait. Very soon after, when you yank your reel to set the hook, the fish realizes he’s swallowed something other than a bug. The fish tries to run but gets pulled back as you start to reel it in. It goes for cover under branches and rocks hoping to get away but you keep reeling it in. After putting up a good fight the fish gives up. You scoop the fish into your net and the fish has lost its freedom.

The porn industry is floating their flies down the river of the Internet. Their flies look enticing to the kids watching them float by…beautiful woman doing things they should not be seeing. Kids with desires they don’t fully understand strike out at the flies thinking they’re the way to fulfillment. The porn industry yanks back on the reel and the hook is set. But unlike the fish kids don’t always know that what they’ve latched onto is a lie, a fake. Porn is not reality and porn will never give them the true love an intimacy that they seek. Some may try to run from it but their desires pull them back and eventually some just give up the fight sinking deeper into a world that twists the beauty of what God intended sex to be into a monster that knows no boundaries. They become slaves to their addiction, their freedom is lost.

Parents, we are often all that stands between our kids and a porn addiction. We provide the computers and the Internet access but often we don’t watch what is floating down the stream of the Internet; let alone do anything to prevent it. Get an Internet filter and protect what comes into your home. Have “the talk” with your kids about God’s design for sex. His design is true freedom and they need to know how to spot the fakes.