Testimonies are God’s currency as far as I am concerned. They allow people to reach others in ways no other words possibly can. So in short summary, I reveal to you all my testimony of how I overcame my battle of addiction to pornography with God. I am grateful, proud, and relieved to say that I am not the person I was two years ago. I am a child of God, and a child of God I am here to stay. So without any more delay, my testimony . . .
I am a grateful believer in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and I struggle with a past addiction to pornography, regret, self-worth, and trusting God with the results of my life. My name is Brandon.
Being a Christian is hard, and it is probably one of the most difficult choices in life. To deny oneself is not easy. We want to live our own lives. We want to pleasure ourselves with what makes us happy, we want to control what we think is controllable, and we want to be our own independent person who does not need to rely on others, for whatever reason. But is this really cohesive with a godly life? I don’t think so. Why? Because when I rely entirely on myself, I put God into a box. A box that limits the one true God. By doing so, I tell God, the creator, that I do not need him. I, in essence, tell him that I won’t trust him. I basically tell him, that he is not worthwhile. How far from the truth this is.
My addiction to pornography and the resulting consequences were created from my own understanding of what made me happy, what I thought I could control, and me wanting to be an independent person who did not rely on others for help. My addiction is a result of my own curiosity, selfishness, and controlling tendencies.
At first, I used pornography to cope with a lack of attention from my parents. Now, they were good parents. They were great parents in fact. They did the best they could in every situation to the best of their abilities. They are role models for anyone wanting to understand and learn how to live a life entirely established in God. However, when one child acts up and causes problems for the rest of the family by lashing out, leaving the house, and causing chaos, good parents, like mine, should rush to assist and correct the child, in hopes of bringing him or her back to God. This happened to my family, and while I fully believe that what my parents did is the correct response to my brother acting out, my other siblings and I were left with less attention and therefore went to destructive habits to fill a hole in our lives. My drug of choice was pornography and I, and I alone am responsible for my decision to delve into sin and the abuse of something.
I first started watching pornography in the summer of 2004. I was over at a friend’s house, and out of curiosity, we watched things no child should ever see. Beginning that next fall, I started watching between ten to fifteen hours a week for the next several years.
When I finally started dating in my senior year of high school, I decided that I should stop watching pornography, and for the first time in years, I was without it for a little under three months. However, after my girlfriend suddenly broke up with me, I was deeply hurt and responded by going back to porn and started binging nightly. Prior to this, I had used porn to cope with receiving a lack of attention. However, after being scarred by this girl I decided to watch even more porn to the point where I would get high.
For a while, I enjoyed it. I enjoyed not feeling anything. I liked being numb and emotionally detached from all things. I always thought to myself, “Who needs painkillers, alcohol, or drugs? I have something that will not hurt me or deteriorate my body at all and therefore I cannot lose.” However, my use of pornography would eventually consume me and I reacted in ways I thought were not possible prior. I started becoming depressed, isolated, as well as abusive towards myself while watching between thirty five to forty hours of porn a week. From this excessive use, it had gotten to the point where the images began to be burned into my mind and I lost control of my thoughts. Every second of every day I had explicit images and thoughts running through my mind and I had grown to the point of hating myself so much for what I had become that I would cut, beat, and burn myself as punishment for who I was. I hated myself so much that I just wanted to die, and for two years I fought suicidal tendencies and risks within myself, all the while, making sure that no one else knew. While I wore a mask of a respectable young man on the outside, I was killing myself on the inside mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I felt that I no longer possessed a soul and I believed that if confronted with a life or death situation, I would gladly choose death.
In one of my journals from time, I wrote:
“God, I know you are there. I know you are. But if you have any mercy in you at all, end my life. Because I can no longer do it. I am a lost cause. My soul is dead and I am not worth the air I breath which is free. End my life. I will take my punishment now, I will go to hell, and accept it gladly.”
Praise and thank God for unanswered prayers.
This was the height of my addiction. This was eight years of my own personal hell for me. I had hit rock bottom and I felt I was unable to get out of this deep, dark, and evil hole that I had dug for myself. To make matters worse, in November 2011, my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and the doctors said that he only had a few months to live. Yet, my father wasn’t scared. In fact, he was never scared. He was determined, he was hopeful, and to make matters even more bizarre, he was glad. Why was he this way? He was practically given a death sentence! WHY WAS HE NOT SCARED?
The answer was God.
I remember once, when him and I were driving to one of his chemotherapy appointments, we were talking about baseball, girls I liked, and stuff like that. Somehow we got onto the topic of manhood and he said that: “A man is not best remembered for what he accomplished in his life in regards to work, possessions, and titles. No, he is best remembered for what he did in his times of trials. Did he stay down or did he get back up? Did he endure through the fires of pain and become refined through it or did he get burned to ash?” And he concluded with, “If I cannot trust God with the big things, I have no reason or RIGHT to trust him with the little things.”
It was always about God to Him. He put his faith into practice and he willingly stepped onto the water while the worst of storms was ranging on. He was bold in his faith, he was radical in his faith, and he was in total and complete trust of God. He left the results to God and God alone. He never once attempted to try to take back control of his fate. Was he nervous? Maybe. But he was never scared.
This inspired me, to change my life. For eight years I had let pornography define who I was. For eight years, I had tortured myself with hell, and towards the end of my addiction I was watching over forty hours every week in pornography, and I had lost complete control of my thought process and emotions. But this was not bigger than God.
When I saw myself, I saw a wretch.
When I saw myself, I saw an addict.
When I saw myself, I saw death.
But that is not what God saw.
When God saw me, He saw a person worth dying for.
When God saw me, He saw what I could do, not what I did.
When God saw me, He saw a child who He loved unconditionally
that just needed to be lifted back up, encouraged, and forgiven.
When God sees me, and sees you as well He sees a masterpiece that has a purpose that we cannot comprehend, understand, or even possibly realize.
When we ask for forgiveness and accept Christ into our heart, mind, and soul, we become TROPHIES of God’s grace.
Romans 3:24-25 says,
“Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty of our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood.”
By accepting that Christ died for our sins while we were obstinate enemies of him, we gain freedom and righteousness. But what does righteousness mean? It means God forgives our sins, our record that is dripping red from our sins, is wiped CLEAN. From his perspective, IT IS AS THOUGH WE HAD NEVER SINNED. Christ took the penalty that we deserved, and purchased our freedom from sin and death, and the price was his life.
Talk about crazy love.
I remember being terrified the day I finally admitted in a recovery group called Celebrate Recovery that I was a pornography addict. I was afraid of being judged, looked down upon, and being denied help. Instead however, it was liberating. It was as if a giant anvil was lifted off of my shoulders and instead of being judged I was welcomed and comforted. It was liberation from Satan, his lies, and the demons that had haunted me for years. I was finally starting a process of getting free from my addiction, free from hating myself, and learning that there is a God in Heaven that, contrary to what I had told myself for years, loved me more than I could ever possibly imagine.
It says in Ephesians 3:18,
“And may you have the power to understand how wide, how deep, how long, and how high Gods love is for you really is.”
God’s love is wider than our experiences, longer than our lives, and higher than our celebration and elation. God’s love is as deep as the depths of our discouragements, despairs, lowest of lows, and can even go past death. It is impossible to be lost from Gods love no matter what we are told or believe to be true. So I kept going to Celebrate Recovery with the promise God gave us.
2 Chronicles 7:14,
“If my people which are called by My Name shall humble themselves and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from Heaven and forgive their sin and heal their land.”
My recovery verse is Romans 7:18,
“For I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good but I cannot carry it out.”
Cause let’s face it, we all, only want to do what God wants. That’s all we want to do but on our own we CANNOT do anything. We are built to be fully dependent on God. If we could have done it on our own, we could have stopped our addictions on the spot, on will, and with EASE.
Romans 12:2 says,
“Do not conform to the patterns of this world but instead be transformed by the RENEWAL of YOUR MIND.”
We cannot change until we are willing to let go of our baggage. Life is hard, recovery is hard, and everything else is hard. At times it seems that everything is so hard that it seems almost unnecessary and in response we can howl at the moon, curse the fates, and kick and scream all along the way, but if we just stand up, lay our troubles at the foot of the cross, and leave them there, these things get easier.
Going back to my father, he would actually outlive the diagnosis that the doctors gave him. He was only supposed to live three months. And again, not once was he ever scared of what would happen to him. He was confident that God would see him through what God called him to. When you looked at him, you no longer saw the gigantic and muscular 230 pound man who stood at an intimidating six foot two. Instead you saw a man who was physically weak and frail because his body had been destroyed by chemotherapy and cancer. But his spirit and trust in God spoke so much LOUDER and STRONGER than anything he could have been physically. I don’t know how many times, people came up to me, and said “He glows.” His trust in God had refined him to someone who radiated something that no words could describe. And on August 27th, 2012, my father entered Heaven, and as he breathed his last breath, he smiled and passed away.
My father inspired me to chase after, follow, and rely entirely on God and God alone, and from doing this I realized that I have a holy, divine, and loving father who will see me through whatever comes my way. There are times where He calls me to things I do not think I can overcome and I still struggle with consequences from my years of pornography addiction. Side effects as it were. But with His help and power, I have been clean and sober for over two years now and by moving forward and trusting in Him and Him alone, all other barriers will be knocked down and out of my way, by the one true king and savior.
My next journey in life is this mission trip that I am to embark on in September that will last for a year. Through this trip, God has made it clear that I am to rely, trust in, and be confident only in Him. Fundraising over $16,000 dollars is mind boggling, leaving my family is daunting, and trusting God with the results is my biggest challenge yet. Like my physical father, I need to trust in my spiritual father to get me through this intimidating and overwhelming journey. But like the Bible says, through Him all things are possible. I will carry on, fight, and endure while I rely on God and God alone.
Thank you and God Bless,
Brandon Williams
De Colores
