Video coming soon. The video teaching for Day 27 is still in production, expected by August 15. Read the full lesson below, it will be added here as soon as it is ready.
Something happened.
I don't know what it was for you. Maybe you do. Maybe you've never connected it to this struggle with porn. But something happened.
Most men who struggle with pornography first encountered it between the ages of ten and thirteen. Say that again: ten and thirteen years old. That's not an adult making a choice. That's a child, getting a wound.
Some were exposed by a dad or a friend. Some by an abusive or grooming man. Others ran into it in the vacuum of an absent father, or as a pushback against a dominating one.
Two kinds of wounds
There are two ways a person can lose consciousness. One is poison in the air: carbon monoxide, smoke, something toxic entering the body and shutting it down. The other is the opposite: not too much of something harmful, but too little oxygen. Different causes, same result: the body goes down.
Wounds work the same way. There are two kinds, opposites, and both real.
The first is the poison of trauma. Something toxic entered your life that never should have. For some of you, it wasn't just exposure to something you shouldn't have seen: it was something done to you. Abuse. Violation. Words spoken over you that cut like a blade. Things that should never happen to a kid, and did.
The second is the thin air of absence. Not poison, but no oxygen at all. An absent father. A home that was quiet in all the wrong ways: nobody fighting, but nobody connecting either. A quiet rejection that still cut deep. A love you needed and simply never got. That absence is not a lesser wound because nothing "happened." Starving for oxygen kills you just as surely as breathing poison does.
What a wound does
The enemy doesn't build temptation from scratch. He cuts a furrow across your heart: an open, bleeding wound. He finds a crack, whether it came from something poured into you or something never given to you, and offers a counterfeit comfort to fill it.
Think of a bone that broke when you were young and never healed quite right. Day to day, you might not even notice it. But put pressure on it (the right kind of stress) and it buckles. That's what a wound does. It creates a vulnerability. A place where you bend when other men stand.
That's not an excuse. It's an explanation. And it's actually the beginning of real freedom: because you can't close a door you've never found.
Naming a wound is easier with someone beside you.
Join men walking the same six levels, in the same season, inside the community built for exactly this.
"Wounds, feelings, here we go"
I know some of you just crossed your arms. Maybe you grew up being told men don't talk about this stuff, they just handle it. I get it. But would you trust a soldier who refused to check his own wounds before walking back into a firefight? No. You'd call that reckless, not tough. Real strength isn't pretending you're not hit. It's knowing exactly where you're hit, so it doesn't take you out later when you least expect it. This isn't about being soft. It's about getting smart enough to win.
"He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives."
Jesus isn't surprised by your wound. He didn't miss it. He came specifically for the brokenhearted. He came for this, whichever kind is yours. The poison, or the absence.
What to do today
The question isn't "whose fault was this." That's not a productive question. The question is: what happened? What opened the door?
Some of you know immediately. Others might need some time, maybe some prayer, before it surfaces. That's okay. You don't have to force it. Ask the Holy Spirit to show you.
Here's something I've seen over and over: when men finally name the wound (when they finally say out loud what happened, or what never happened) something shifts. Not everything. But something. Because you can't begin to heal what you refuse to name.
Get out your journal today and write down your answer: what is the wound beneath this struggle? Was it poison, or was it absence? When did the door first open?
Write it down. Don't edit it. Don't spiritualize it. Just be honest.
This is Day 27 of Victory Over Pornography. Continue to Day 28 →