A few years ago I had a dream.  It was absolutely the most terrifying experience of my life.  I awoke too afraid to close my eyes again…for a very long time.Trying to pray away the feeling inside of me wasn’t enough.   I woke up my husband and tried to drag him into the experience-hoping for some reality check.

To this day I can clearly recall the impression left with me:  there is a terrifying evil force in this world and it is after me.  As the weeks rolled by, I naturally had a heightened desire to be closer to God and do His will in order to stay out of the path of that evil.   After a time, however, the dream was accompanied by some  interpretation.  It had to do directly with a class I was holding in our home about pornography awareness.  It came into my mind this way,  “When you decide to stand against pornography addiction, you are willfully putting yourself into Satan’s  territory.  Expect his fury. He hates you.”  OK.  Scary-but ok.  The impression solidified my desire to fight the beast and further confirmed the path I had chosen.  In the ensuing years, I have done my best to educate, help, and open up dialogue on what I feel is one of the greatest plagues of our day.  So,  while I have had some experience with drug and alcohol addicts, most of my addiction recovery posts will be about pornography addiction specifically.  I feel that this addiction is particularly pervasive in our world community and quietly (or not so quietly) accepted in many circles of influence.  In my opinion, pornography addiction is SOOOO much easier to hide for a much longer period of time than other types of addiction.  And it blindsides really, really, really great people.  How? Why? The reasons are as diverse as the demographic but here’s a few:  in its ‘soft’ form, it’s everywhere (Hello! Here I am at your grocery story check-out stand and on the freeway billboard.  Oh, and there I am in story form at your local library.  Oh, hey, don’t forget about me!  Your local teen sexting the student who sits next to me in English class! It’s ok to look at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, right?) Most pornography is free. It’s so very accessible.  It’s private.  It can seem quite justifiable in some of its presentations.  And it really revs up an emotional side of us that might have not been awakened before…or that hasn’t seen daylight in a while. We feel something new, exciting and ALIVE.   Furthermore, it doesn’t involve anyone else…right?  And, I suppose, it seems harmless at first especially if the primary reason for viewing it is simple curiosity or accidental exposure.  Young children that might never have access to drugs or alcohol, may have ready access to a computer or smart phone.  Adults who draw clear boundaries around harmful substances taken in through the mouth or blood stream, may not have such clear distinctions about harmful substances entering through eye and ear. For these reasons and others that I might not have discovered yet, pornography addiction is running amuck through every strata of society and in just about every demographic you can think of.  And I’ve seen the effects of its smothering arms curl around the lives of loved ones.

I had a dream…and it opened my eyes.  I can’t turn back now-I’ve already agreed to fight.  So I will soldier on taking great inspiration from the powerful words of Edmund Burke:

 ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’