You Have This Moment

The Set Free Summit taking place in North Carolina wrapped up last night. For an overview of what you/we missed, check out the hashtag #SetFree2016. We’ve devoted three of the five weekday posts here to this one topic, but when I started scrolling through old posts here and discovered the one I re-posted yesterday, I was also reminded of this one.

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With the kids now older and facing high-school homework after supper instead of the early bedtimes of former years, Patricia donned an light jacket before heading out for her weekly Wednesday night coffee shop ritual with Julie and Deanne. Well, almost weekly; there were frequent cancellations in the past three years, but they tried to meet as frequently as possible.

“So when are we leaving?” her husband Rick asked.

“What do you mean we?” she responded.

“I thought it might be fun to crash your little group; as an observer or like those war reporters who are embedded with a platoon. Unless, of course it’s me you talk about every week.”

“No, we tend to talk about church, and politics, and raising kids.”

“So is there room for an extra body?”

“You’re serious?”

“Absolutely.”

Patricia texted the other two, “What do u feel about Rick joining us 2night?”

Julie didn’t answer, but Deanne texted, “Sure Y not?”

And so for an hour, Rick sat with the women and talked about church, and politics and raising kids.

On the way home, Patricia said, “You’re not going to want to do this every week are you?”

“No; it was a one-off thing.”

“So Rick, I know you, what was this about really?”

“Honestly?”

“Yeah.”

“Honestly? I didn’t want to be home for a full hour with the computer. When you go out, it never ends well.”

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Isn’t it ironic that the very technology that offers you the option of reading Christian blogs like this one, downloading sermons, looking up Bible verses online, etc., also offers both men and women the ease and convenience of experiencing sexual temptation like we’ve never known before.

Knowing as I do the various search terms that will find you all manner of websites, I can honestly say that every time I approach the machine — and I do business online all day long, plus prepare three blogs — I am reminded that each visit represents a choice: Choose things that will strengthen spiritually, or choose things that will do spiritual harm.

Like the goaltender in a hockey game, we can’t always block every “thought shot” that is fired toward us, but I believe we can exercise self control on a minute-by-minute or even second-by-second basis. I am always reminded that:

You have this moment.

You may not have won an hour ago, and you might slip an hour from now, but you have this moment to make the individual choice that affects this moment.

Right now, it’s a rainy day as I type this. It was a weather cancellation nearly a decade ago that found me with idle time typing a random phrase into a search engine that led to a random chapter in the middle of an online erotic novel. That’s right, it was text, not pictures. It wasn’t pictures for quite some time.

Idle hands. The entire universe-wide-web at my disposal.

Even today, I admit that search engines permit all manner of random thoughts to be explored online with varying results. I often find myself like the guy who loves to join his buddies on fishing expeditions, but actually hates the taste of fish. It’s about finding the fish, but not necessarily enjoying or consuming the fish.

I suppose it’s different for everyone.

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I think it’s interesting that Genesis 2:9 tells us that the original source of temptation — the fruit of a tree in Eden — was found in the middle of the garden. Not off to one side. Not hidden behind other trees.

In the middle.

For men men — and women — reading this, your tree is right in the middle of the family room or living room; or it’s a laptop that is in the middle of wherever you find yourself.

Maybe your tree and my tree are different, but the result is the same: Temptation never disappears.

I looked at this a different way in a devotional at Christianity 201. There’s a link to a song, and a specific point (about 70 seconds) in the song you can fast-forward to.

I’ve found it to be helpful.

Feel free to share what works for you.

You have this moment.

Set Free Summit: Confronting The Porn Problem

…While doing research for one of my books on addictive behavior, I conducted a telephone interview with a leading expert in the field of sexual addictions. He told me, “I believe evangelical Christians have a greater tendency to fall into sexual addictions than any other sub-culture in the United States.”

When I asked him why, he said, “Because sexual sins are so taboo in the church people find them more exciting. Once they commit a taboo sexual act, they refuse to tell anyone. Their belief that they have done something bad creates guilt which leads to shame. This shame generates pain which they try to medicate with more sexually taboo activity. The deeper they fall into sexually deviant behavior the more closely they must guard their secret. The longer the behavior continues, the more addictive it becomes, and the more it destroys their core being.” …

…According to a May 18, 2010, survey conducted by Today’s Christian Women Online, 34% of their readers admit to intentionally accessing porn. The results of this are staggering. More women are getting involved in cybersex, more women than men convert online conversations into real-life affairs, and more women are accessing porn while at work.

If those stats didn’t get your attention this next one will. According to Family Safe Media, the largest group of viewers of Internet porn is children between ages 12 and 17. In spite of this staggering statistic, most of the Christian parents I speak with deny their kids have or would check out a porn site…

~Bill Perkins, article “Porn in the Church: The High Cost of Silence.”

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Last night around 9:00 PM I became aware of a number of people tweeting using the hashtag #setfree2016. (You don’t need a Twitter account to see the posts.*) I decided to check it out.

The Set Free Summit started yesterday evening and runs 3 more days in Greensboro, North Carolina and is hosted by Josh McDowell Ministries and the makers of Covenant Eyes computer software. Opening night speakers include McDowell, author Steve Arterburn, David Kinnaman from Barna Research, and author Michael Leahy.

Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps providentially, the cover of the latest issue of Time Magazine has just released (April 11 issue) with the cover story Porn and the Threat to Virility, which chronicles the rise of porn-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED).  A sample:

A growing number of young men are convinced that their sexual responses have been sabotaged because their brains were virtually marinated in porn when they were adolescents. Their generation has consumed explicit content in quantities and varieties never before possible, on devices designed to deliver content swiftly and privately, all at an age when their brains were more plastic–more prone to permanent change–than in later life. These young men feel like unwitting guinea pigs in a largely unmonitored decade-long experiment in sexual conditioning.

The article is packed with research; budget about 10 minutes to read it all. (Some language might be considered edgy.) There’s also a short book excerpt from Peggy Orenstien’s Girls and Sex which again, coincidentally (providentially?) I had just heard about after youth ministry specialist Walt Mueller noted it in an April 1st blog post, along with an audio link (embedded) to an interview the author did with NPR.

While the Set Free 2016 event is not streaming live, and it’s not an annual event (so far), you can get an idea of what you’re missing by clicking on the 4-day tabs on the conference schedule. (I hope some videos are eventually posted.) Again, allow some time to scroll through to see what each presenter will be discussing; the short seminar previews are themselves a window into this issue.

Bill Perkins concludes:

Our strategy to achieve sexual purity has to be like a laser-guided missile. These weapons constantly adapt to the changing terrain as they zero in on their target. Because the moral terrain is constantly changing, we must be adept in adapting as we pursue our target: sexual purity.

 

 

*The link is for the “live” feed on Twitter. If you just want highlights, click the tab that says “top.”

The Pornography Effect

We have good news and bad news regarding the book project, The Pornography Effect:  Understanding for the Wives, Girlfriends, Mothers, Daughters and Sisters.

The good news is that you get to continue to read the book online for the foreseeable future.   The reason is the bad news:  the publishers we’ve been talking to have either broken off communication or indicated they don’t see the book happening in the next 90 days.   Frankly, the way the U.S. economy is, who can blame publishers for not wanting to take the risk?   This is a “crisis” book on a “crisis” topic that’s been written in a “crisis book” limited length so that pastors can keep multiple copies on hand.   Despite the past successes at marketing multi-packs, publishers aren’t beating a path to our door over this one.

I still think we’re on to something here.   The book tackles the problem of men and online internet addiction by explaining to the women in their lives — and anyone else who’s interested — just exactly what’s going on online.   It offers some new insights and presents some different hypotheses about internet addiction.   It doesn’t offer any easy, three-step solutions to a very complex problem.

So what we do right now?   I’ve been in talk with one pastor about taking the project full circle and doing it in seminar form.  Then we’re back to same issue:  Women in small towns aren’t going to identify another family member’s addition by showing up for such a seminar.   However, people are never as afraid of ratting out their kids!   So we’ve proposed a seminar for parents that would deal specifically with the challenges that are faced by people at the junior high, high school and college level.   Instead of 15 sections, the seminar would have a simple theme:

• What’s in the picture?
• Who saw the picture?
• Who took the picture?

True to form, the seminar would also introduce one additional new idea, which, if you’ve been reading my comments on other blogs, should be familiar to you by now:   An entire generation is growing up without a sense of shame.   And as a result, an entire western society is losing its sense of shame.

They say that one key thing that separates us from the animals — and there are others — is our ability to blush.   We’re losing that.  Big time.  Very quickly.   And if you have kids in the age/school brackets mentioned above, you should be very, very concerned.   Perhaps that would make a good book premise, too.   Why have one unpublished book when you can have two unpublished books?

In the meantime, if you or someone you know has concerns about a third-party’s internet viewing patterns, be sure to send them to link to this online book.   It will help bring clarity of thought to a major issue in our communities, churches and families.

If you’re sending the link to non blog-readers, it’s important to tell them to click on “previous entries” when they get to the end of chapter six.   This book was simply posted on a blog page in reverse chapter order, so that opening the web page, it reads from first to last chapter.   But some people aren’t familiar with clicking on the link to get to the “previous” pages, which in this case, are actually the “next” pages.

Also, while I’m not a counselor or pastor, we did set up a special e-mail address associated with this blog, for people who have questions in dealing with this particular issue.   But you guys get to comment right here!