Losing Battles
4 min readSo it’s Wednesday night. My wife has been out of town for, oh, say, 12 hours now, and I’m fighting a battle that I’m fairly sure at some point between now and Saturday – 72 hours – I’m going to lose. In a lot of ways, knowing that I’ll probably lose the battle is almost as bad as the losing the battle. The anticipation is awful. Jesus says to pick up our cross and follow him – this is my cross.
I think I’ve been addicted to pornography since I was in junior high. I remember, distinctly, my first venture into that realm. I’m 27 now. It’s been 13 damn years. That’s a long freakin’ time…and when I stop and really consider the amount of time, money, lies, energy and ____________ (fill in your own blank) that I’ve wasted on this addiction, it boggles my mind. I believe I probably could have cured cancer by this point had all that energy gone to something productive. I’d be much better as a guitarist than I am now. Sigh.
But I’m not really going to try and write to convince you that porn is bad. If you don’t know that by now, or if you don’t believe the testimony of the THOUSANDS of witnesses (one CBS story said that 8 million people spend approximately 11 hours a week on porn), then there’s probably not going to be much that can convince you. I know enough of my story to understand how insipid and dangerous this one product can be (here’s a hint – if you’re getting angry reading about me putting down porn, you probably have an issue) and how hard the habit is to break.
But why? Why is it so hard for us as men (I guess women get addicted to porn? I don’t know any), not to get addicted, but to beat that addiction? I mean, I understand addictive personalities. I really do. If it wasn’t porn for me, it would be (and has been) work. Or friends. Or partying. Or PS2. Whatever. But why can’t we kick this habit?
I have for periods of time. I went months once without looking at pornography. I thought in my heart of hearts that I (notice the emphasis there) had beaten it. But to do that, I was working 16-hour days five or six days a week. My friends ask me all the time why I load my schedule so freakin’ much – it’s not healthy to be as busy as I am. I’ve never really told anyone that one of my big reasons is that it’s the ONLY way that I can escape my addiction to porn.
It turns out that’s not enough though. The flesh is a powerful adversary and cunning.
Merely avoiding the sin, while helpful in the short run, I think, is not an answer to the solution. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t know what the answer to the solution is, but I have a thought. Colossians 2:23 reads, “Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.”
Now, I don’t mean to say that this verse is saying that we can go look at pornography (if you put this verse in its context, Paul is addressing the idea of doing certain things to make us holy – following dietary guidelines, etc). But, what I have noticed is that my attempts to make myself sin-free “lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence.” That is, through my own restrictions and through my own self restraint, I’ve done nothing. In the same way that ancient Jews would have controlled their own circumstances (and realistically, they attempted to control God by taking their salvation into their own hands), I have attempted to create my own salvation and control my own circumstances. I don’t think it’s my job to do that. The reason that I lose my battle with my personal temptation (it’s porn for me, it could be any number of things for you) is that I haven’t given God control over that aspect of my life. And logically so, right? Who wants to bring that to God?
The simple conclusion is, if we don’t, he won’t fix it. And fixing it may hurt like hell. But in the surrendering, in the giving over of power, there is a fresh start.
It’s Thursday night. 46 hours to go…
