By Tom Buehring
The 700 Club
CBN.com -It was a hot summer day and 12-year old Jonathan Daugherty was playing outside with a friend. The boy wanted to show him a secret. “Now, you have to understand, in my 12-year-old mind, I was thinking, ‘We’re going to see something dead.’ But when we got out in this field there was this tree stump. He reached his arm down into this hollowed out portion and I’m still thinking,
‘He’s grabbing the raccoon or whatever’, and he pulled out this rolled-up magazine. And then he opened it up and everything changed. It was porn. I’d never seen pornography. I didn’t know why there were pictures of naked people and what they were doing. I didn’t do anything about it.”
Pornography became Jonathan’s secret too. At first he was confused by what he felt, but his awakened appetite wanted to be satisfied. “It was almost immediate that I started searching for more material. (It was) sheer curiosity. I still didn’t know what sex was. All I knew was there was something that reacted in me when I initially saw that porn.”
His obsession with pornography grew. Jonathan eagerly searched for magazines and images to feed his craving. “All through junior high and high school I was developing this secret addiction. The foundation of my ultimate addiction was learning to have a fantasy life that placed me in the center and had everything in my life revolve around me. All these women are wanting to do whatever I want them to do.”
Despite fueling his fantasies through porn and promiscuity, Jonathan struggled privately with shame and self-worth. “Especially for a kid like me who grew up in the church there’s an additional sense of shame. Every time I’d want to really try to go deeper in an authentic way with God, it’s like my lust would take me on a detour. If you’ve failed for years and years and years in managing your sexuality, it’s not a long trip to then think you are a despicable, horrible, perverted person and you have no value.”
Jonathan met Elaine while attending college. They began dating and eventually married. “What I saw in her was just this authentic person.” Jonathan remembers, “I wanted more of that. I wanted more of her in my life because I thought, ‘This is a good thing to have somebody with that much faith and purity and authenticity can be good.’ Marriage cured me - for about five weeks. It really wasn’t until I was married and had this other person that sort of acted as a mirror to me, that I saw just the depths to which I was really trapped in this.”
Story continued , here.
No comments:
Post a Comment