Women and Pornography
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The Flirtation Experiment and Why Intimacy Matters
“When does the love fade away?” I was sitting in hair and makeup with Brittni De La Mora, a former porn actress and now leader of XXXchurch and Love Always Ministries. Brittni and I were speaking on a panel for CBN’s Unhooked: Purity in a Pornified World. It’s not often that I get an opportunity to talk with women in similar places of ministry and life. Brittni and her husband got married in 2016. My husband and I got married in 2018. We each had girls, three months apart. So, sitting in the room with her felt like an opportunity to gain some wisdom. My husband and I were just…
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Boundaries, Discernment, and Why You Might Reconsider Redeeming Love
It’s as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday. I was a first-year student at Bible college and had just confessed to a years-long struggle with hardcore pornography. My three roommates didn’t know. They just knew I had stuff I was working through. During free time one day, one of my roommates looked up from the book she was reading. “Guys! Listen to this!” She began to quote several sentences from a “sex scene” in the book. It was veiled, and definitely not anything like the sex scenes I used to read at school on the library computers. Still, I recognized one when I heard one. She read…
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Take “Break Free From Porn” Off Your To Do List
How many times have you told yourself this time will be the last time? Have you ever tried to quit watching pornography? Stop masturbating? Stop lusting? Then you have probably discovered it isn’t exactly easy. It seems like it should be, right? Isn’t this what God wants us to do? Doesn’t He want us to stop? You would think, then, that we would just be able to wake up one day and that’s it. It’s over. We’re done and never look back. Easy peasy. Isn’t that what so many pastors seem to preach? Just stop. You want to stop. You try to stop. So why can’t you stop? It might…
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Tips for Fighting Temptation During the Holidays
Is this time of year hard for you when it comes to your struggle? You would think all of the focus on gratitude and Jesus coming to earth would make it less likely for us to struggle. But that’s just not how it works. It’s important to remember that your struggle does not start when you pick up your phone or log on to your computer. It starts before that, and it can seem so much worse this time of year. Why? Well, if you’re in school, you are finishing up exams (hello, stress) followed by free time. If you are away from home, you’re coming back to family (and…
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Three Signs You Are Exploiting People
In 2021, Simone Biles made headlines during the Tokyo Olympics when she stepped away from the competition for mental health reasons. While most responses I saw were understanding, encouraging, and even empowering, there were plenty of people that seemed to take personal offense to her decision. How dare she. She was called a quitter, selfish, even a sociopath. Christian commentator, Matt Walsh, called her an embarrassment and “in some ways an appropriate representation of a country that has gone soft.” Oof. Several times as I’ve read news articles and comments on social media of people expressing their disappointment and chastising her, I’ve wanted to remind them that she doesn’t owe…
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What Does Freedom From Pornography Look Like?
So many Christian women write in saying they want freedom from pornography. Here’s my question for them (for you): what does that look like? On a road trip recently, I stopped by my mother’s house. Every time, without fail, she hands me something of mine that she found while going through boxes in her basement. This time, she handed me a bag and as I went through it, I found a tiny notepad. I caught a glimpse of the first page: “Dear God, Tonight I’m fighting, struggling…” I felt my cheeks flush with embarrassment. What had I written? Had she read it all? What does she know? Yes, I share…
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Resource Review: We Too by Mary DeMuth
The purpose of this blog isn’t just to address women struggling with pornography, but really to change the conversation about women and sexuality in the church. How does grace impact our struggles and intersect with our wounds? How can the church immitate the love and grace of God while addressing things like sexual addiction, sexual identity, and sexual abuse? Since I just finished up the series addressing porn in the church, I wanted to highlight a resource that addresses another issue in the church: Sexual abuse. As a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of someone in my church, this is something I hold dear. I’ve written about it…
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What the Modest is Hottest Message Gets Wrong
Most of the time, when we talk about modesty and lust in the summertime, we’re telling the women what to wear. We want them to dress modestly so that men won’t lust. We forget that women can struggle with lust too. So I struggled to come up with some metric. Some balance when writing a post on swimsuits. What should you wear? What shouldn’t you wear? Then I realized, modesty isn’t really about what you wear. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment that had a dress code for swimming. Women had to wear one piece swimsuits, even when swimming with just the girls (because the lifeguards might be…
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To the Girl Who Wonders if God Can Be a Good Father
Father’s Day is here again, and while many are buying their dads bad ties, funny socks, or new fishing poles, there are many of us who spend father’s day nursing the wounds of what could have been. My dad left our family when I was little. The day is still seared in my mind. It was Christmastime. When my piano lessons were over, he wasn’t there to pick me up. The piano teacher called my mom at work. Back in the day before cell phones, there was no way to reach him if he were on the road. So, I waited for one of them to come and get me.…