A TIME TO WRITE

I’ve been trying to write my book in my head for the past 5 years and it hasn’t come together so I’m taking my sister Deb’s advice and just writing.  I know I have a story of hope and change to tell but I don’t know where to start and where to end.  I don’t know which stories will reach the people that I really want to reach…young men who are experimenting with pornography.  I was addicted to it for most of my life before I realized what kind of a hold it had on my life.  It wasn’t until the FBI agent showed at up at my office that I realized that it was controlling my life.  It cost me my job, my marriage and 3 years in a federal prison.

I want to tell a story that grabs the reader’s attention like a good novel would.   In fact, I’ve considered telling my story as a novel but that wouldn’t have the impact I want people to get. I want people to recognize that they can change their lives through a relationship with Jesus Christ.  He was one of the first people that talked to me after I got arrested and he only said two words…”Seek Me”.  That was it and for some reason, I did.

For six months I spent time in the Bible and I spent time with him in prayer.  And my prayers were unlike any prayers I had ever made.  I talked to him and I listened to him.  He encouraged me when I was down or had a failure and told me that I would survive my prison experience.  I journaled my prayers and go back them occasionally to see how many of his answers came true.  And they all did.  

That time gave me opportunity to reacquaint myself to my family…my sister and two brothers.  It wasn’t easy going from the superintendent of schools to a federal felon but through God’s grace, I managed.  So many families are impacted by pornography that it should be a national crisis.  But it will never be considered anything more than immature men going shopping for unnatural sex objects.  It something that people rarely speak of in public although more than half the men in America have looked at it.  For some, it’s a one-time thing but some men like me, I was addicted the first time I saw it.  I stole it out of our mailbox before my dad could look at it.  I snuck into porn shops even as an adult because of the shame that I felt for wanting to look at it.  It has defined much of my life.

I’ve been out of prison for almost nine years now and I really don’t want to look at porn much anymore. It’s lost its hold on me.  But it took 3 years in prison and a lot of self-examination to get there.  I think about the life I lived before but I don’t regret not being in it now.  I don’t long for it.  I miss the people I met during those three years, the real ones anyway.  I’m not sure where my book will start but just writing is putting me in the mood to write more.  I have two people who want me to get this book written, my sister Deb and my friend Paul.  They keep telling me to write it so I guess I’ll have figure out where to start it. And how it ends.