Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (13 page)

I
didn’t want to do that. A lousy grade wouldn’t feel good, and I
wanted to feel good. If I had just taken the bad grade I deserved, I would be
looking back now with a bit of pride that at least I was man enough to accept
the consequences of my procrastination. Instead, I’m writing about it
today because I’ve never forgotten that first time I made the decision to
cheat. That’s because I figured out a way I could get a perfect grade
without learning one state or capital. You see, figuring it out felt good, and
I wanted to feel good.

How typical of guys like me! I didn’t want
the hassle of studying, but I ended up with a much
bigger
hassle for
not studying. My procrastination was replaced with guilt, shame, fear, and an
unexplainable emptiness. Exchanging study time for worry time turned out to be
a poor trade.

Then the worst possible thing happened. I didn’t
get caught. No one ever knew but me. Well, except God, of course, and now you
know as well. Looking back, I can see that what I really needed were
consequences; instead, I experienced nothing but pure relief. So, thanks to
Satan, I got my reward for compromise. I didn’t get a bad grade or a
tough talk from my dad. No, I felt as though I had hit some dollar-slot jackpot
in Las Vegas.

In that city out in the desert, some men simply gamble
away the money they saved for the trip and then return home. Others stay until
they’ve gambled away all the money they brought with them—including
gas money to drive home! If you talk to these big-time losers, you often find a
common theme. Somewhere along the way, they won big and were rewarded with a
huge jackpot prize.

Since that moment, they no longer gamble for the
money. They gamble to feel that exhilaration of winning one more time. Surely
there’s a way to recapture that feeling of invincibility again! If you
sit in on a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, you’ll hear guys say that the
worst thing that ever happened to them was the time when they won, not when
they lost.

It was the same with me when I got away with cheating. When
I received the good grade that I didn’t deserve, it was as if the red
light on top of my Las Vegas slot machine started flashing, bells started
ringing, and sirens started screaming. I had won big! The sense of power I felt
from beating the Brazos Valley school system was enormous.

But I had
not beaten God’s system. In God’s system, when you do the right
thing, He protects you from the sorry consequences of merely following your
urges, feelings, and desires. Christ loves you and wants to protect you so He
can lead you to the best of what He has to offer.

I wasn’t
thinking that way. I thought I was an exception to the rule and exempt from
God’s system, but I wasn’t. No one is. Sooner or later, you pay the
price and experience the consequences of compromise.

Let’s say you do something stupid, like stick your hand into a fire.
If you leave your hand in the flames long enough, you’ll feel the
immediate consequences of excruciating pain. An even dumber action, however,
would be to think that you’re different and stronger than everyone else,
believing you can put your hand in a campfire and not be burned. Since everyone
knows that fire’s consequences are instantaneous, few men play with
fire.

Sin has a different timetable, however. You might sin for years
and never experience the consequences, but they will come. I wish somebody had
told me that the consequences may not appear for many years. I wish somebody
had told me that God wanted me to obey Him out of love and faith, not just to
avoid immediate pain.

Since there were no
immediate
consequences when I cheated in fifth grade, I figured there were no
consequences at all. So the next time I had the choice, I cheated again. I felt
pretty good about getting by and moving forward. Yet if you fast-forward ten
years of my life, you would find me graduating from college with a degree in a
subject that I had no intention of using. I wish I would have graduated with a
degree in music, which might have led to a career in opera or musicals on
Broadway, but I wasn’t able to learn a foreign language, which was a
requirement for a degree in music. Having cheated all those years, I’d
never learned to study well enough, so I had to drop out of the music school
and find another major.

That’s not all. I graduated from college
with the easiest degree I could find, just to get out. The consequences of
compromise landed on me with a crushing thud.

I must stress this
important truth. If you base your life on wanting to feel good, any time
something feels good, you’ll believe it’s acceptable. Every time
there are no consequences, you’ll believe that it’s even more
acceptable. It’s so tempting to live that way! The world is always
screaming at you to do what you want
when
you want. If it makes you
feel the way you want to feel, then go ahead.

So I never delayed
gratification. Feeling good was the ultimate goal of my life, which is why I
cheated rather than studied. This proclivity led to a wasted education rather
than preparation for a great career in music. Wasting four years of expensive
college education was nothing, however, compared to what was in store in the
other areas of my life.

That first decision to cheat on the fifty
states and their capitals led to a far greater pain outside the classroom than
I ever experienced inside a school. As much as I hate to admit it, my
unwillingness to delay gratification even led to the death of a child—my
unborn boy or girl. It grieves me today to say this, but it took the death of
my child for me to learn some hard lessons that I desperately want you to learn
so that you don’t make the same mistakes I made.

As I mentioned, I
was a good kid with a vibrant faith until I turned eleven and began making up
my own rules. When I didn’t get caught at cheating, I reckoned that maybe
the other things Mom and Dad called “wrong” might not be so wrong
after all. Right in the wake of those first decisions to compromise for
anything that felt good, I discovered masturbation. A friend taught me how to
do it.

I’d heard nothing about this practice before then. My
parents never talked about sex, and my two older brothers never told me about
it either. I’d never had an orgasm and had no idea what one was, but my
buddy seemed to know everything. I remember the night very well. We’d
gone next door to his grandmother’s house to have some homemade bread
covered with generous swaths of butter and molasses.

We took the
molasses-soaked bread up to a tree house in his backyard. We ate as we lay on
the floor of his small and dark home away from home. After we finished, he told
me he’d learned how to do something that felt very good. He said all I
had to do was reach inside my pants and rub my penis up and down. If I kept
doing that, it would feel even better and better, and then some stuff would
come out, and when that happened, it would feel
really
good. But first
I had to get my penis hard to get things started.

I thought this all
sounded weird and strange but, as usual, I would try anything to make me feel
good, so I reached inside my pants. I had to get my penis hard, right? I knew
very well how to make that happen. I had some pictures stored in the back of my
mind that I instantly called up and viewed as if I were seeing them for the
first time. They were pictures of naked women I’d seen tacked up on the
walls in my grandfather’s machine shop.

Ever since I was four and
five years old, I loved walking into that old shop filled with lathes and
presses, where Grandpa made tools to retrieve broken oil-well pipes. His office
wall was adorned with nude pinups, and I stared at these voluptuous naked women
in awe. My favorites were the women wearing hard hats and operating heavy
machinery. There was also a drawing of an Indian’s face with a hidden
picture of a naked woman for those who looked closely enough. I did, and I grew
to love seeing the naked form of the opposite sex.

My grandfather
thought nothing of having those pictures displayed so boldly; after all, his
machine shop was his turf. Meanwhile, I thought plenty about it, although to
this day, I still don’t understand how my father could have allowed me to
go into my grandfather’s shop. My father was a nondrinking, nonsmoking
Southern Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher. It made no sense that he
would allow my brothers and me to see pictures of naked women, but my
grandfather was a strong and stubborn man. Perhaps my father felt too weak to
confront him. Who knows? All I know is that those pictures heavily impacted my
life and affected the way I came to view women.

Just the fact that a
man could put pictures of naked women up on his walls made a huge statement
about women. First, since none of these women were his wife, it meant that
unclothed women were public property. They were
items…things…objects for everyone to look at. Second, those
images meant that they were objects that men could use for their pleasure.
Those pinups might not have seemed too significant to my grandfather, but they
certainly changed the way I viewed women, and I’m talking about
all
women, not just the busty models in those pictures. I began to
view women as a little less than human, as if they were just a little less than
men.

When it came time in that tree house to recall those pictures, I
could do it instantly. All I had to do was transport my mind to my
grandfather’s machine shop, and that was easy enough. I remember that
everything felt good and, just as my friend promised, something happened that
felt
very
good, and this stuff came out. I remember thinking that I
would never forget that night, and I haven’t. I remember wanting to do it
again and, before the night was over, I did, although I had this small feeling
that what I had done was bad. I knew one thing: I wasn’t about to bring
it up and talk to anyone else about it. It would just remain a secret between
my friend and me.

Everyone has a different story on how they learned
about masturbation, but more important than how you learned is what happened
after
you learned about it. When you learned to masturbate, you
didn’t learn how to commit the unpardonable sin. You didn’t engage
in some perversion or do what only mentally ill people do. You did what almost
everyone learns to do. For a few, the practice is of little consequence, but
for many, it becomes a destructive habit or dependency.

It certainly
became a problem for me. Almost every day I would go back to the naked picture
files of my brain and view the collection while I masturbated. It wasn’t
long before I got a little tired of the same old pictures, so I added some to
the collection. Those were easy to find. The more I added, the more it felt
like women weren’t real people to me. I didn’t see them as fully
human; they were just something to give me physical pleasure. All I was
concerned about was their physical properties. Psychologists call this the
objectification of women. When you do that, you can then feel free to treat
them any way you want.

I continued masturbating almost daily until I
began dating, which started when I got my driver’s license at age
fourteen (another reason I loved rural Texas). There were some girls I really
liked. There were a few I think I actually loved. I treated those with as much
respect as I could and had great times doing fun things. But there were other
girls that I just wanted to use. All I wanted to do was touch them and have
them touch me. I wanted to see them like I wanted to see those pictures on my
grandfather’s wall.

Each time I did, I collected a new image of a
new object that I could recall when I engaged in my daily habit. All I wanted
to do was to feel good, and I had decided long ago that I was willing to
compromise to feel good. While many young women I dated in high school and
college were sexually pure and stayed sexually pure while we dated, I was
always manipulating and conniving, going for what was forbidden. I wanted to
collect new images.

Eventually, however, I wanted more than auto-sex. I
wanted the real thing. I eventually tasted the forbidden fruit when I entered
the promiscuous period of my life. When I did have premarital sex, it gave me a
sense of control and ownership, as if these young women belonged to me. They
were objects of my gratification, just like those pictures on the wall of my
grandfather’s shop.

What started as
a discovery in a tree house at age eleven led to a lifestyle of promiscuity and
using women. In college, every relationship was a sexual one—at least in
my mind. So often I had little to offer a girl, but I wanted everything from
her. It didn’t register with me that this was someone’s future
wife, or that she was a real human with real needs that I could meet. Instead,
it was all about me and making me feel good. Had I been godly, she could have
become
more
because of her relationship with me. Too often, she
was
less
because I took from her only what a husband should take.
Nothing about any of that feels good today. In fact, it feels horrible.

I was promiscuous, reckless, and looking for anyone who could make me feel
good. None of the rules applied to me, especially with a certain girl that I
started dating. She couldn’t have been more wonderful, except for one
flaw—she somehow settled for someone like me to date. She listened as I
proclaimed my love for her. In response, she gave me everything she had.