It was a cold, rainy night. Seventeen-year-old Laurie cried … broken. She could not lift the weight of her sins anymore. She was pleading for help, urging Jesus to come and physically hug her. Then suddenly, a light came through the darkness and gave her a sense of peace she had never felt before. Her mom, hearing her daughter’s weeping, rushed to hold her in her arms and tell her that everything she had been keeping inside was in the past. And her mother reassured her that Jesus promised to drag her off her path of darkness.
Laurie, a college student, struggled with a pornography addiction for more than five years. While this may seem repulsive to some people, we all have an addiction of some type. We often believe God stops loving us because of that trap no one else knows about.
One day Laurie went to a youth seminar, and her pastor shared his testimony on how he struggled with pornography addiction. At the end of the meeting, he told her that even though her addiction changed her teenage life, it did not define her.
Afterward, she began learning and putting into practice the four steps to recovery from any addiction. Now she has the assurance that having an addiction does not define a person, and there is deliverance through God.
Four Steps to Addiction Recovery
- Accept that we have a problem that needs to be fixed. We need to be honest with ourselves by admitting we want to break these chains. We need to be honest with Christ, telling Him how we feel and that we want to be cleansed from the addiction.
- Find a trustworthy person to support us. This could be a family member, friend, mentor or someone else we know will listen and not judge us. Often the devil wants us to think we are the only ones facing this addiction.
- Come up with a recovery plan. Now that someone else knows about our addiction, we can ask them to be our accountability partner. By knowing what triggers us to go to our addiction, we can reach out to our accountability partner when we feel tempted. Laurie shared some resources she has used to get through her pornography addiction: Bible reading plans from the You Version Bible app: These Bible plans are designed for anything we need support with, from grace to purity to sadness to freedom from addiction.
- Covenant Eyes: Software that helps keep us accountable and stops us from navigating inappropriate websites.
- Fortify: An app to quit pornography addiction.
- Fight the New Drug: A nonprofit, non-religious organization that fights for real love. They are on every social media platform, so we can follow them and raise awareness of how pornography relates to human trafficking.
- Lyf: An app where we can find other people going through their journey of addiction. People all over the world can relate to this struggle, and it can be done anonymously.
- Take recovery one day at a time. Healing from addiction is meant to be a lifestyle of small changes every day. We can find new hobbies that make us feel happy instead of running to the addiction. Relapses are part of healing; they do not make us weak. And asking for help from God or others makes us strong because we are being aware of our actions.
Fighting against our addiction is a battle that requires patience, love and understanding. We need to stay close to God and not isolate ourselves when we fall down. God promises to deliver us from anything if we claim His promises that nothing can stop God from loving us.
Diana Celaya is a junior studying computing with an emphasis on web development and minors in communication and information systems.
