Dear Person Who Googled "Porn"...
I've said nice things about Stuff Christians Like before... but I need to make sure y'all are aware of a couple of posts that Jon (the author of SCL) put up there - partly because it's stuff I struggle with & partly because he writes about it with such humor & passion & grace.
#172: Letting porn win.
When I was in the eighth grade, I used to pretend to go sledding at the dump so that I could find porn the workers kept in the bulldozers there.
There are 12 billion reasons for me to write that sentence and 2 for me to not write it. The two are my in-laws, as this is bound to be the kind of post you hate for your mother-in law to read. And the ladies in her bible study aren't much better. But every year, the porn industry makes something like $12 billion a year. So there we are.
Dear person that googled "porn" and got me.
First, let me say that searching for porn and landing on this site must suck. Honestly, if I had searched for that (which I have before) and landed on a site that specialized in comparing GI Joe characters to the Bible, I would have left instantly. And you did. The average visit by someone looking for porn is 7 seconds long.
But have you stopped to think about how crazy it is that you landed here?
When you search the phrase "porn" in Google, you get 252,000,000 results. There are a quarter billion web pages you can land on, so how did you get to mine? I guess we could say it's coincidence or that maybe you already looked at the other 251,999,999 other pages and mine was the last available. But you probably already know what I'm going to say - maybe it was God. God is weird and wild like that and I think He loves getting people to end up in different places than they expected. But let's not talk about God right now.
I responded in the comments section of his blog:
It helps me, as a recovering addict to pornography, to make a couple of things clear to folks:
- the word addiction explains the compulsive hamster wheel cycle of suck that is porn - it doesn't excuse the way it hurt my wife or my churches, even when they didn't know what was going on
- talking about porn without talking about masturbation is like discussing peace in the Middle East without discussing religion - which makes it INSANELY difficult to talk about in your typical church setting.
I don't claim to be a genius at this stuff, but I've written a good bit about my personal experiences & teaching on my blog, aka pastor guy - you're welcome to follow the link and/or ignore it.
Jon, thanks for keeping this issue smack dab in the middle of this blog - sadly, this is stuff way too many Christians like.
So you don't have to do too much searching, here's the direct links to those articles I've written:
i just loved this post. I um, just discovered your church and have begun exploring.
ReplyDeletei loved this post because it's real. i admire a pastor who can be real.
i recently blogged about pastors who are trapped in situations where they aren't allowed to share their struggles. (myspace.com/poeyjoey). The blog triggered an overwhelming about of e-mails from hurting people (pastors included) who feel like they can't talk about the real issues in their lives.
thanks for this. it was refreshing
I, um, am glad - thanks for the kind words.
ReplyDeleteAuthenticity is VITAL - not as a way to write off our bad behavior (like some boorish reality show contestant - "I'm a butthead in the game because that's just the way I am") but so we can have accountability & healing in our lives.