To explain my struggle against this sin is to, in essence, describe my faith journey as a whole.
So, let’s start there.
I was raised in a Christian home, albeit one that didn’t actively have the Holy Spirit influencing it. My first memories don’t involve my father; my mum split from him when I was very young, and as such, I had difficulty understanding God from the beginning. He was our “father,” but I didn’t know what that meant. My mother explained to us how to be good, but she could never tell us why. Spiritual discussions were few, and we mostly figured things out on our own.
Temptation and Secrecy
One such thing I had to figure out on my own was sexual temptation, although calling it temptation at this point feels wrong. It was more of a curiosity. A deadly thought that seemed innocent on the outside. A worm sourced from a classmate wriggled its way into my brain when I was nine, stoking a lasting curiosity. I just had to wait until I was home alone next, which happened just a short month later. A quick and innocent search led me to easily bypass the Google SafeSearch on the family computer, and suddenly I was in, and I wanted to see more. I explored and explored, unable to properly understand all the things my little nine-year-old brain was seeing.
After what seemed like hours, I stopped. I felt guilty, terribly guilty… Yet a mere two weeks later, another opportunity came up. New questions and curiosities arose, and I just knew I wanted to try and find it. Every click I took towards the forbidden just made me want to see more. The time I waited between each search on that old family computer became shorter and shorter. I even began looking at stuff while others were home… a small tilt of the computer screen and an agile mouse gave me all the secrecy I needed.
My Fall Into Addiction
I remember very clearly an event shortly after. My mum, now married to my stepdad, purchased Blackberry tablets for me and my brothers for Christmas. It sat on my shelf as I contemplated heavily deciding to use it to look up bad things on the internet. Finally deciding it was what I thought I wanted, I walked up to take it off the shelf, only to find my Bible sitting on top of it. It would have to go if I wanted to pursue this path. I wish I had taken that warning more seriously.
Then began my nine year descent into addiction. I looked into worse and worse things, all while keeping the smart-kid persona to my peers. I fell into depravity, looking at my female classmates with nothing but lust; I knew this was wrong, but I leaned more into my addiction as a “cure,” of sorts. It would “satiate” my desires. This is a lie, and because I fell for it, I became lost in my mind and craved nothing but pleasure all the time.
When I was 17, through a youth program called Alpha, I finally got to see Christianity for what it really was: life. It became clear to me that I had to change, or I would face eternal destruction. I eventually mustered the courage to tell my parents, and a trusted friend and mentor, which is what finally brought the first step of healing. I got to see the light that was the church community for the first time, and I learned that I could find help.
But even then, it was far too difficult to retreat into myself; to hide. I needed to somehow make a covenant promise with my eyes to be pure, and to avoid looking at this sin that can so easily entangle. I considered not having a phone or smart device at all, but that would mean losing many social connections.
Clean community, or easy communication with community—I couldn’t seem to have both.
Blockers
Excuse the play on words above, although now is indeed when Covenant Eyes comes into the picture. However, not immediately. One day, I came across an ad for a porn blocker app. I knew I had to get better, but I lacked the self-control from many years prior, so I invested all in. I bought a year-long subscription, and I began my journey afresh. Unfortunately, while I experienced freedom for a time, I discovered ways to get around the blocker on my different devices. I decided it was time to move on.
I had heard of Covenant Eyes at this point, but shied away from it, as it seemed intrusive. Next, I tried a different blocker. It was a fair bit stronger than the last one, but I found that community was still being cut out. I had to block Facebook, Discord, Youtube, to name a few. I could no longer enjoy some aspects of my social life because of my blocker. It wasn’t the dream I had envisioned. And, there was always another site. You can find pornographic images on a much larger percentage of sites than you may think, and I just had to keep blocking them. By the end of my time using the blocker, I had over 100 sites blocked!
The experience of using these apps taught me that I needed to have a deeper change and motivation. It wasn’t enough to try and brute force my way out of bad content, because there was always more content to be found. It was in this search that I explored Covenant Eyes once again.
Victory in Jesus
As I tried to break Covenant Eyes the same way I had gotten past other blockers, I cried. I felt such a deep joy that I hadn’t felt for a long time in regard to fighting this problem.
I can happily say that with Covenant Eyes, I’ve only blocked one site, on and off. Covenant Eyes not only provides blocker services but also screenshots your activity and sends it to your friends. Suddenly, you’ve got another reason to not look where you shouldn’t. The screenshots are blurred quite heavily so as to not leak any private information, but the friend will get the gist of the image, as well as the page name in which the image was captured. This persistent program will also send a notification to the friend when it thinks you’re currently in trouble, bringing you the support you need. It is by far the most free I’ve ever felt having a blocker on my device.
If anyone reading this needs hope, please try Covenant Eyes. Your technology and your purity don’t have to be mutually exclusive! This is what it means to bridge the gap between technology and relationships. Rest assured you will still struggle; I certainly do. But when you struggle, let others be behind you to pick you back up.
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