December 5th, 2017
Dear Pornography
You don’t own me anymore. You have no grasp on me, because I don’t want you anymore. I clung on to you for eight years and nine months ago I walked away from you, for good. I remember you use to grab on to me and follow me around everywhere we went and now you watch me from afar, afraid of what will happen if you touch me. You lurk around the corner waiting for me to come running towards you. Yet you know that I am never going to look at you the same way ever again. So stand around the corner, but remember I will always see that awful face of yours, a face that I will never go near again.
I remember you use to look so beautiful to me and now your face is like a nightmare. I don’t know how you ever brought me joy. I do know for a fact that I liked the thought of sneaking off with you and having the possibility of getting caught with you. It was exciting. It was like playing hide and go seek with you. No one ever did catch us though and a lot of times I wish they had because maybe we wouldn’t have spent so much time together. I remember if I was having a bad day you would call on me to make me feel better. If I was having a good day you would call on me to bring me down. I know now that you did those things so that I would stop feeling all together, that I would always be at a middle ground, never happy, but never actually sad. You made me just content enough. It was just enough to keep me wanting more.
The first time I saw you, you were the most beautiful thing I think I ever did see. You danced for me and you looked oh so innocent. I was only 12 when you took everything away from me. At age 12 you ruined my life and you didn’t care. You had no mercy, but I couldn’t see it at the time. When I saw you I knew it was wrong, I knew I should have dropped you and ran, but I didn’t. I stuck around just like you wanted. You cradled me and said everything was going to be ok, while you put a ball and chain on me so that I could never fully get away.
That chain dug into me for so long it left a permanent scar. Every time I tried to get away from you the scab would be torn off making an even deeper cut. A cut that would send me right back to you. When I finally did get away you left a deep wound that eventually scared over. Even though I got away I was so self-conscious about the scar I let no one see it, and that’s exactly what you wanted. But now I’m letting everyone see it. I’m showing it off with pride because it means I lived. It means I walked through those awful times with you, but now I’m free.
Every time after the first time, when I came to you, you looked more beautiful than the last, but I felt less and less the more I came to you. I eventually stopped feeling bad when I came to you. I eventually stopped feeling a lot of things because of you. You took away the happiness and the joy to life. You made me take out the color to life and only see the black and white. You made me look at people like they weren’t people at all. That was the worst part. The part where people soon became objects only for my enjoyment.
Those 8 years seem like a blur. I came to you too many times. I let you destroy me too many times. I let you enter my life again and again even when I said I was done with you. When people interrupted us you knew I would find a way to see you soon and you loved that because that meant I needed you. When I walked away from you those were the times that you showed me an even more beautiful part of yourself and eventually enticing me back to you. My longest time without you was three weeks. Now its nine months and I look back at those three weeks and laugh at how easy those weeks actually were.
You took so much from me in those years. I hate you for that. I will never be able to get those years back. I will never be able to get those images out of my head. I will never be able to say sorry enough to the people I hurt because of you. You destroyed a large part of my life.
When friends would ask me “what’s the deepest, darkest secret you have” you were the first thing I thought of and yet the last thing I would admit. You enjoyed that too much. You smiled so bright because you knew I could never admit you were a part of my life. You laughed when my heart would beat so fast as I told them a lie when I tried to avoid the question all together. You made me feel ashamed for something you caused.
I vowed to myself a long time ago that the only person I would ever tell would be my future husband. You cringed at that and told me that he would never love a human being like me. He would never fully accept me because I was too far in it with you. You knew that my worst fear was that he would never love me. You knew it, and you took advantage of it. You didn’t want me to tell anyone. That was your ultimate goal. If you could make me feel scared of telling one person that wasn’t even in my life at the moment then you succeeded. You knew if I couldn’t say it to him then I wouldn’t say it to anyone, ever.
At the time you didn’t know how God was working in my life. You were so fixated on me not telling anyone or trying to look even more appealing that you never saw Him coming. I’ll tell you this much though when I walked away from you in May, deep down I thought I would come back to you. Then one month passed and then two. Next thing I knew was that I was at training camp. Gods’ relentless pursuit really didn’t hit me till then. I was in a session when someone’s words caught me off guard. She said “once you’re done looking at those images or doing what you were doing and you turn over in your bed or at your desk, God is still there. He reaches out for you and says ‘I still love you’. He doesn’t leave once you open up that tab or think those thoughts. He sits there with you repeating over and over again ‘I love you, l love you, I love you’”. In those moments I knew you were gasping for air. I was still petrified of telling anyone and that’s the one thing you still held onto.
That next month and a half before I left for the race was the hardest, because you threw everything out at me. You threw anything that would make you look more enticing then anything before, but your mask was slowly slipping off your face, revealing what was truly underneath.
At the same time God was telling me that His love was more powerful than the chain that was around my ankle. He was telling me that He could offer me so much more if I trusted Him. The night I got off the bus when we landed in Costa Rica God told me to tell everyone about you, I laughed and walked away from that conversation and when I looked over at you, you were smiling, and I hated the way you smiled at me. Over the next couple of weeks God kept telling me to tell my team and I kept laughing and walking away and you kept smiling.
That first night in Nicaragua you were there and you were scared. You were scared because for the first time in my life I was honestly considering telling everyone about you. Your mask, by then had completely fallen off your face. I could see the gnashing teeth and your sunken in eyes. You were the worst nightmare that anyone could dream of. I knew deep down that I should have just shouted it out that night, but then you attacked me. You made me so scared. I started crying and shaking, shaking that I couldn’t control. After that happened you knew I was scared of you. I was scared because you had such a large grasp on me. I was done with you, yet I was still in the palm of your hand. You pulled the edges of your mouth into a crooked little smile as I walked away that night. You knew that it was going to take more than just myself to tell the people around me.
At the same time you were crumbling. Every day after that night you were a further step away. Every time God confirmed to me that I needed to tell my team, He took away the fear you placed on me and put His strength in its place. God gave other people visions about me telling my team about you. He told me not to quit. He said I was almost home. He told me I was so close to freedom. Yet you still insisted that I be afraid of what people would think of me after I told them.
Then one day the shackle cracked. You placed so much fear on my heart that day. Yet it wasn’t enough because I told my team I was going to tell them later that night what I had been going through. When I looked at you, you weren’t smiling. You looked disgusted at me, and I was happy about that. You were still trying to put as much fear in me as possible, but it wasn’t enough.
That night I told my team I was so scared to tell them about you. I told them I was afraid they would reject me and would never look at me the same way. I told them that I wasn’t ready to tell them, but God was ready for me to tell them. I closed my eyes as tears ran down my face and when I opened them you were so far away I could barely tell you were there. Instead of a cold chill brought by you, there was a warmth in the room from the presence of Christ. There was not an ounce of fear on me anymore.
I told them. I told them that for the past eight years I struggled with an addiction to pornography, I struggled with an addiction to you. I told them how you came into my life. I told them how you changed me. I showed them my scar from the shackle that was binding me. I told them everything about you. For the first time you looked like you were in pain. You weren’t trying to dance for me anymore, you weren’t doing anything really, because you knew you lost. You knew that, that was the last time you would ever be able to come close to me. You knew that the freedom that Christ placed on me that night would always be bigger and stronger than you. You see that night I wasn’t running towards you, I was running towards Him, because He was offering me something out of love. So that night my chain was broken and I was set free for good.
The funny thing is when I told my team about you they didn’t bat an eye. Instead of walking out of the room and rejecting me like you told me they would, they said “I love you”. They wanted to know more, they asked me questions. They wanted to know how I beat you. They wanted to know what I had learned from my struggle with you. They wanted to know how I would raise my kids so that they didn’t have to come to know you like I did. They didn’t hate me they hated you. That’s what you didn’t want me to know all along. You see Christ hates the sin but loves the sinner. There was no reason for me to listen to you all those times.
So today I sit here and you sit so far behind me that I can’t even tell if you’re here at all. Today I sit here telling the whole world about you. That was something I never thought I would do. Telling people about you is allowing them to see the ruined parts of me, but it’s also the parts that Christ has restored.
Dear Pornography, you have nothing on me anymore. You cannot put fear on me anymore, because there is nothing to be afraid of anymore. I am a daughter of the most high King and I am a co-heir with Christ. I don’t need to settle for you anymore, because He can offer me so much more than what you could ever dream of. I am done chasing after you. I am done hiding you. I am done with that ball and chain. So let’s just be clear, I am done with you!
Never Yours,
Shelby Laber
