It is amazing how being captured and bound to anonymous moments of imitated pleasure can radically alter so many components of my life.

As a minister I hold fast to the view that while man and women are very different in outlook, characteristics, roles and personality we are all equal in the eyes of our creator and as such we should treat each one the same.  A high ideal that we all strive to achieve yet so many pre programmed social and cultural norms limit our ability to actually act this out. 

One element of my life that was changing during my stolen moments of dark pleasure in front of the computer screen was my ability to see women as they were made to be.  My mind stopped thinking of the flesh in front of me as a person but an instrument of sexual pleasure and that it was her joy to do so, she was not a person, (I argued this point to I was blue in the face to prove to my wife that I did not want these women in ‘real life’), she was not a daughter, mother, or sister.  She did not have dreams and hopes or a life outside of what was happening on the screen.  Over the course of 20 years my view of women was being distorted by what I allowed myself to see and think.

I could no longer hold a descent conversation with any women, not just because I was thinking sexual thoughts but because I had trained myself to only deal with them in a sexual manner.  I still find it difficult to hold a conversation with any women even when it is called for and no sexual ‘thoughts’ on my behalf are present.  On a more dangerous level was my ability to subconsciously dismiss any female that did not fit the ideal image presented in the porn websites, I wouldn’t even try to connect.  You can see that this presents as a real issue for a minister of the Good News of a God that loves us all.

We think we love ‘women’ and the fact that they turn us on through pornography proves it.  I have found that this only proves how much we have departed from the view God has for His great creation, in fact I would go so far to say that the addiction to pornography has actually caused me to despise women, to distance myself from real women and broken an ability in me to connect in a non sexual way with women.  I am the worse for it, I am not able to be a full minister because of it.

You know your view of women is broken when you are masturbating to an image of hurt and broken girl doing things that only excite you and never causes your heart to consider their desperate need for someone to save them, from who you ask? From the one on the other end of the screen, ME, the sad fact is that there are ministries out there trying to save these girls from people like me. If I am to be a great minister of Christ I need to step up, own up and get help from this destructive addiction.