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Exchanged Glory V: God Meant it for Good
<page 158>Jesus seemed to be returning me to the point of the worst decision in my life and giving me the chance to make that decision over again.
In the spring of 2003 my wife, my children, and I planned a trip to the Bahamas – our last large family vacation before my oldest daughter moved out of our house. We rose early in the morning and drove to the airport with what we thought would be plenty of time to handle any difficulties that might arise.
Unfortunately, when we got there I found that I had brought a birth certificate with the wrong type of seal. I needed one with a government seal, and mine had a hospital seal. This kept me from being able to take the flight, so I sent my family to the tropics while I drove home to get my paperwork in order. I would join them the next day.
Tired and discouraged, I began to wonder if something terrible might happen, like my family being killed in a plane crash. I considered what I would do if that occurred. The thoughts that rose in my heart were so against my values that they drained me. Something deep inside me told me I should move to another part of the country, find some woman who smoked, and live my sex life the way it came easily to me.
I was discouraged by the seeming naturalness of the feelings. They appeared so normal, so matter of fact, as if this was just the way it should be for me.
How could this be the case after all that had happened in my thirty-one years as a Christian? The old fears rose in my heart, “This is who you are. All of your nice little theories about God and His plan are just a mind game you play to give yourself empty hope. You can never really change.”
I had recently taught in church on both the Pain Drain and the book of Job. I had sincerely said I wanted to be Content with whatever God chose for me, even if it meant enduring my own unstated personal problems for the rest of my life. It was my way of putting my “child of promise” on the altar as Abraham had done with his son Isaac (Genesis 22). I so much wanted to be released from this inner plague. The hope that I would someday experience a much fuller emotional freedom meant so much to me, but I was ready to plunge a dagger into that if God wanted me to do so.
I sort of expected God to say, “Do not lay your hand on the lad, or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me” (Genesis 22:12). My heart sank as it looked as if my Isaac wasn’t going to be climbing off the altar anytime soon.
I decided to let myself Grieve and be Broken. I knew that God was working everything for good, but I also knew that there would be times when my emotions would disagree with that <page 159>assessment, and this was one of those times. I didn’t need to deny what I was feeling; I needed to honestly express my discouragement as I looked for God’s help.
I prayed and thought about how much I wanted to talk to someone who had similar problems. I wanted to grab them and say in effect, “How could this be happening? I could write a book about how to overcome sexual sins. I understand what it means to be given over. I know that I am dead to sin and alive to God. I love my wife, and I have shown this for decades. I have resisted wrong actions and impure thoughts. I have done my best to give the devil no place in me. I do spiritual warfare, hear God, mourn, handle my emotions, submit to the Holy Spirit …but this thing, this messenger of Satan that threatens everything I believe, won’t go away. Nothing that God has done has reached into the core of who I am sexually!”
I wanted a shoulder to cry on, someone to hold me and tell me it would be OK. I wouldn’t have believed them, but just hearing them say it would have been nice. I knew that the Lord had been with me from the beginning, but I wanted to talk to a human being who could understand.
On an intellectual level, I knew how this day’s temptation would go. I would resist the devil, and the intense emotions would calm down within a day or two. I was dealing with an unusual set of circumstances, after all, and my life would soon return to normal. Still, I mourned over the sickness within my soul. I grieved that the inner center of who I was sexually seemed to have changed so little. It felt as if all God had done was to rearrange everything around it.
I looked for God’s Appointment. I used the Emotion Commotion Chart to take my angst down the Pain Drain and considered what the Holy Spirit was saying to me in the middle of it. I thought to myself, “I have an entire day with nothing planned, and I am greatly motivated to try to get in touch with someone who can encourage me. Maybe God wants me to go out on the internet and search for an article on sexual addiction. There might be something by a Christian that will help.”
I had never seriously considered doing this before. I knew about the dangerous sexual websites on the internet, so my instinct was to stay away from the subject when I was online. Also, I was afraid my wife or children might see me and misinterpret my intentions. It would have been tough for them to tell the difference between an honest search for answers and a desire to indulge myself.
And could I really be sure what my own intentions were? Could I know if I was looking for information or was crawling as close to lust as I could without falling over the edge into it? All of this had led me to play it safe and stay away from the subject of sex while online.
On this day, however, it seemed likely that God was leading me to do the search. The risk to my family was minimized, and I suspected He had set up the situation. I did a search on the words “Christian sexual addiction,” and to my surprise, I discovered there were online support groups for Christians recovering from sexual addiction. I had heard about local groups for this purpose in some parts of the country, but I didn’t know of any near me. It had never occurred to me that there might be a group on the internet.
I looked at what was available and decided to give a group called New Life Ministry a try. I started the sign-up process and then left for vacation the next day. I wasn’t sure what I would find when I got back, but I was excited about the possibilities.
At New Life Ministry I discovered a group of struggling men, many of whom would love to have experienced the victory God had given me over the years. I had planned to pour out my heart to them, mourning my struggles and complaining about my temptations. When I read their stories, <page 160>however, I realized I couldn’t do that. Some of them were fighting to save their marriages; others had already lost them. Most were just hoping to find some way to stop looking at pornography and falling to other sins. They needed encouragement and teaching, not a sob story from someone who had a bad day.
In order to help them, I started to write out my story. After about ten pages, I realized I might be writing the book I felt the Lord had told me about several years before[74] (which eventually turned into the five books of the Exchanged Glory series).
I was uneasy about writing. Though I had found some freedom, I still couldn’t say that I had found anything that I could honestly call “free indeed” (John 8:36). Until I had experienced a shift in the core of my sexual emotions, I didn’t trust my words. The needs of the men in the group, however, were enough to move me past my reticence. They were still struggling to reach the place that I had reached twenty-three years earlier. How could I hold back what I had if it would help them?
After about a month of writing, my thoughts were in good enough shape to start posting. I decided to share an early version of Chapters Nine through Twelve of what was later published in Exchanged Glory: A Vision of Freedom. Before doing so, however, I introduced myself to the group by posting a short testimony. I had never before shared about the smoking fetish in such a public manner. It was scary, but it seemed to be time to take a step of faith and see what God would do.
The day after posting my testimony, I saw someone smoking for a split second out of the corner of my eye while I was driving my car. As I felt temptation, I looked to God to see if He had anything to say. Was there some Appointment He had in store for me in this situation?
I felt the Holy Spirit move me in a way I had never before experienced. It was as if I entered an emotional time machine and somehow tapped into the feelings I had experienced as a ten-year old boy. Jesus seemed to be returning me to the point of the worst decision in my life and giving me the chance to make it over again. Many decades before, I had subconsciously chosen to create a smoking fetish to handle my problems. This time, He would help me to make a better choice.
Guiding my experience was a bare outline of the story I have shared in this book: My mother smoked; I asked her to quit; she tried; my father convinced her to start again; I handled that badly; I eased my inner angst by developing a smoking fetish.
I had come up with this theory about my past a number of months earlier while reading Love is a Choice,[75] but it hadn’t yet had much of an impact on my emotions. On the day of my “time machine” experience, that changed. I saw my family as it had been, but this time I understood it with the wisdom of God. I was upset at my mother’s choice to smoke. It was foolish for her to have turned to that rather than pursuing Jesus. When I was young, I had justified her lack of self-control and used glamorized images from the culture around me to eroticize it; this time I knew better.
I was ready to tap into righteous anger as I considered what was before me. I knew I needed to forgive my mother, but I would do so without making the mistakes I had made as a child. One of <page 161>the main hooks of the fetish had always been its “counterfeit forgiveness.” This time, I was going to allow myself to feel what was in my emotions and to look for the Holy Spirit’s answers.
My father’s lack of faith and workaholic lifestyle also stood out. I wished he had tried to create a godly atmosphere in our home. I remembered how many difficulties I had faced because I had grown up without the knowledge of God. I still cared about him, but I chose to be honest about my dissatisfaction with his choices.
As the experience continued into a second day, my emotions progressed to the point where I felt it was time to make a choice about my sexual orientation. I could embrace normal sexual desires for a lifelong relationship with my wife, or I could once again choose the smoking fetish. It wasn’t a hard decision, and I was surprised at how little conflict was involved in the entire process.
This was the point at which the time machine became challenging. I was suddenly faced with feelings from some of the most sensuous sexual temptations of my life. They seemed to talk to me as if they were a seductive woman: “I am the desire worth dying for. Do you really want to live life without the incredible pleasures I can give you? You have a gift that few others can enjoy; how many people can so easily experience the sort of continual sexual excitement you can? You have turned that down for a long time, but do you really want to change the inner machinery that makes it possible?”
I was reminded of the fact that though sex in marriage was more fulfilling than addiction, it sometimes drove me nuts. It was hard to wait for a time when both my wife and I were available. There were commitments, sicknesses, and a host of valid activities that pulled us away from fulfillment.
The seductive voice reminded me that I could enjoy the wonder of my fetish all day long. And though the desires were in some ways a monster that destroyed me, how could I deny that they felt beautiful? Did I really want to give up such an easy source of intoxicating release?
The whole experience reminded me of the foolish woman in Proverbs 9.
A foolish woman is clamorous; she is simple, and knows nothing. For she sits at the door of her house, on a seat by the highest places of the city, to call to those who pass by, who go straight on their way: "Whoever is simple, let him turn in here"; and as for him who lacks understanding, she says to him, "Stolen water is sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant." But he does not know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of hell.
I considered saying, “Do you think I’m stupid? I have been looking for a way to get rid of you for decades. I rebuke you demons in Jesus name and command you to leave me!” I had, however, rejected these sorts of sensuous voices thousands of times with an attitude like that, and they had always come back.
It wasn’t a question of whether they were going to flee (James 4:7). Of course they were, as they always did when I stood in faith. The question was whether the emotional dysfunctions that were making them feel like such a part of me were going to be healed. Was this messenger of Satan going to depart in some meaningful way?
<page 162> For the first time in my life, I sensed I had a significant say in that question. God was giving me a chance to reclaim the feelings that had gone astray so long ago. The “time machine” experience was touching the core of my sexuality.
I calmly told the “beautiful monster” that I wouldn’t return to the fetish. I also did what I should have done as a preadolescent boy. I cried out to the Lord and told Him I didn’t know how to handle what was happening. I admitted my Brokenness and looked for His Appointments to move me through it. To the best of my ability, I was going to choose His kind of sex, but I suspected that this wasn’t going to be enough. I needed Him to take care of whatever else was necessary to make that commitment an emotional reality.
A short time after this, the whole experience was over. I was hopeful that something significant had happened, but I also knew it might simply have been a fleeting trick of my imagination. I was eager to see if anything was different, so the next time I saw a woman smoking, I watched her to see what would happen to me. I had tried this experiment many times before, almost always with disappointment. This time was different!
Though there was still a temptation, it was of a different nature. In the past, staying pure seemed to require me to deny who I really was. This time, it no longer felt like part of my identity. It was as if I could go back to it if I wanted to, but the fetish no longer came from my deepest heart. It was more like a form of nostalgia – something that drew me from the past but didn’t hold me any longer. In order to turn back to it, I would have to deny who I now felt I was.
The orientation of my deepest sexual emotions had shifted. God had been digging down to this level for years, and now enough of the emotional root of the fetish had been unearthed and affected by the light for a significant reorientation. There were going to be many more tests, trials, and changes, but the worst part of my thirty-plus year nightmare was over.
Surprisingly, this part of my healing consisted largely in affirming the Anger I felt as a young boy. It was the correct response on my part to my parent’s decisions regarding smoking, but I hadn’t known how to handle this sort of feeling as a child. I turned it against myself, where it grew into a self-destructive rage. The fetish had been my attempt to protect myself by transforming that rage into pleasure.
I have sometimes been shocked that it is possible for a human heart to make this sort of error. It is so far from what I expected that I am not sure I would have believed it if someone had told me that this was such a key part of the fetish.
I have watched my healing, however, and I have seen how important it has been for me to properly process my Anger. It had become so woven into the fetish that when I began daily treatment of asthma in 2008, I realized that the tightness in my chest (which was now being relieved by medicine) had been goading me toward the fetish for years. The tightness made me feel as if smoking had damaged my body, which stirred my buried rage, which produced a desire to transform my feelings with the “magic” of the fetish. The train tracks in my heart turned even asthma into a temptation.
<page 163> Emotional healing has come as God has led me into righteous Anger, forgiveness, and love. He has let me know that He also is upset over sin and death, and He Grieves with me over it. Together we take my Fear, Guilt, Anger, and Sorrow down the Pain Drain, and His Spirit teaches me to wisely parent my emotions. I no longer feel the need to deceive my heart with permissive-love or numb it with addiction. I find my answers at the throne of grace.
I can’t help but notice the parallels between my experience and that of today’s generation. They are growing up with the pain of divorce, social breakdown, and any number of other problems. Yet they are told to tolerate all of these in the name of love.
The Unprotected Heart Stronghold thrives in that sort of deceptive environment. The emotional pain is anesthetized by a belief system in which little is considered wrong. At some level, however, people sense the violation of God’s laws and feel unprotected. It is easy for their developing internal Parents to warp under the pressure. Combine this with the abundance of erotic images in society, and many of them will choose to relieve their angst through sexual sin of one sort or another.
I believe that freedom will only come as people face their issues squarely and find God’s wisdom. He is the only One Who knows how to guide our emotions into what they were designed to experience. There is real hope. …After 2003, my world has never again been the frightening pornographic place I once knew. I have found a steady decrease in temptations related to the fetish, and this has been a great relief.
I have, of course, needed to work through large numbers of related issues. Each one feels like an increase in temptation at first (because it first shows up in “smoking fetish form”), but that increase generally reverses itself fairly quickly. As I mentioned in earlier chapters, when it comes it usually turns into a wonderful growth experience. The battle results in greater freedom.
The support group I joined, New Life Ministry, put me in touch with books and articles about sexual addiction. I discovered that since the early 1990s, a steady stream of material had become available. I just hadn’t been exposed to it.
As I read, I gained insights that changed my view of my past. It had seemed as if God had neglected me, as if He had left me to suffer with just barely enough grace to survive. My reading revealed a different story. People in my situation were supposed to end up falling into hopeless and chronic addiction. At a time when I had little human help, when the language hadn’t even been invented to describe what I was facing, God had taught me to stand. He had been my Friend and Comforter, helping me to live a life that amounted to an incredible string of divine Appointments in the face of great weakness.
When I put it all together, it seemed that He had placed a map to freedom in my heart. My life was similar to an assignment a friend of mine, Owen, had during the Vietnam War. Owen was dropped behind enemy lines in order to study the enemy’s positions. After taking notes and drawing maps, he made his way back to his fellow soldiers to share what he had learned. In a similar way, I had been dropped behind the enemy’s lines of sexual sin, and as I had made my way back God had explained many strategies and positions used against us. Now He wanted me to share them with others.
<page 164>I had many times suspected that this was what He was doing, and that was part of the reason I kept mental notes through the years. With as unorthodox as my experience was, it still seemed worth recording for others. I am glad that I have finally been able to make it available.
The act of writing the Exchanged Glory Series of books has also been a key part of my restoration. Jesus has been with me, clarifying my thoughts and helping me to see the significance of what has happened. I can barely describe what this has meant to me. How many people get the opportunity to sit with the Holy Spirit for nine years while He explains their life? The ideas that formed in my heart took shape and spilled out into my computer. It was as if I was giving birth rather than simply writing. The burden transformed into labor pains and healed me as it passed through me. I became even more convinced that in my darkest moments, God had been weaving evil for good.
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