About Me

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About Me I thought what I would do here is tell you how I became aware of the pornography matrix. It truly is amazing how God can work through some very unusual circumstances, i.e. Joseph. Keep in mind as I tell you my story Joseph’s words to his brothers who had sold him into slavery, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.” Genesis 50:20 I was about eleven years old when I saw my first pornographic magazine. I still remember ever picture, every detail of that day like it was yesterday. Ironically I was attending a Vacation Bible School class at the time it happened. All the kids had gone out to play behind the church in a beautiful grassy yard that had a huge oak tree growing in the middle of it. The tree was so large it covered the entire yard with a cool shade. It was a perfect spring day. We were playing hide and seek. My friend and I ran over to some trash barrels behind a small grocery store next to the church. We squatted down to hide and there on the ground next to the barrels was a magazine. We picked it up and began looking through the pictures. I never felt my heart beat so hard, there was so much adrenalin racing through my veins I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest. I was totally unaware of it at the time but those images would forever be burned into my mind¾ even thirty-seven years later I can still see every picture. A 5th grader doesn’t have much access to pornography so it was several years before pornography again came into my life. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have a hold on me. Sex became the center of my fantasy world. Every relationship with a woman from that point on would be in some way about sex. In high school the access part changed. A friend of mine had found a huge stash of magazines. Stacked on the floor they must have stretched two or three feet in the air. I remember his room being freezing cold when I would spend the night. He would stuff all those magazines down in the heating vents to hide them from his parents¾ completely blocking off all the hot air to his room. This really though would turn out to be an unusual circumstance for me. Unusual because it was experienced with another person. Pornography would become a very private addiction. I remember the first magazine I bought for myself. I was a senior in high school at the time. I went to a small drug store in town I knew carried them. I remember being so scared, and the adrenalin pumping so hard, that when the clerk asked me if I was old enough to be buying such a magazine I could hardly speak. My mouth was so dry my upper lip had stuck to my gum above my teeth. Adrenalin and pornography went together for me like macaroni and cheese. In college access to pornography became even easier. I began going to a local strip club and buying magazines on a regular basis. Even though I had accepted Christ and been baptized in eight grade I couldn’t get rid of this compulsion. I remember in high school weeping at the kitchen table with my mother, telling her I wasn’t a Christian. I couldn’t admit to her why. But I just knew if I truly was a Christian I would be able to get rid of this uncontrollable urge and I couldn’t. I was truly like Paul said, knowing what I wanted to do, and doing the very thing I didn’t. After college I got married. Maybe this would solve my problem I thought. But it didn’t. I would go through good times and bad. Sometimes I could keep things under control, sometimes no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t. I remember moving after being married for about four years to another town. The move had provided me an opportunity to start afresh. I didn’t have all the same accesses and the same temptations. But I remember sobbing in our kitchen after about a year in our new home, telling my wife I just couldn’t control it. It was like a pressure building up in me that couldn’t find any release. It’s very hard to explain to someone who has never experienced it. It is almost like you’re a dam during a flood. The waters keep rising and the pressure of temptation keeps building until the whole thing crumbles. So I knew it wouldn’t be long before the whole thing would start over again. I would start buying magazines again, start watching pornography trailers on the internet, and my wife would catch me and another wedge would be put between us. I know if your are an addict this all sounds amazingly familiar. It has always struck me as I have met men over the last several years how similar our experiences are. I could practically finish a guy’s sentence when he starts talking about how he got involved in pornography and the troubles it has brought him. This all was meant for evil, but now for how God turned it around for good. My first glimpse of the pornography matrix came when I had been on a long three week hiking trip on the John Muir Trail in California. I love the outdoors and this trip was literally life changing in that it gave me a whole new perspective on life. The first thing I notice when I got back was how much stuff I had. I had been carrying around on my back for the last several weeks everything I needed to survive and more. I decided upon returning home I didn’t need all this stuff, and I especially didn’t need the TV. I realized what a huge waste of time TV was and I just decided I wasn’t going to watch it anymore. After about a week of being home I noticed I didn’t have those urges for pornography anymore. I wasn’t sure at the time exactly why, I just knew I felt free for the first time in my life. I mean totally free! After about four months of being home we decided to go to my parents for a visit. My mom and dad are big TV fans so I relented from my TV fast and sat with my dad and watched a basketball game and the news. The next day I had my first twinge of desire for pornography. I knew immediately what it must be¾ the TV. It was very easy to identify because of the complete lack of desire up until that point. I was amazed that something that seemed so harmless, a basketball game and the news, could trigger in me a desire for pornography. When I got home I told my preacher, the councilor at the church and some close Christian friends this amazing discovery. But my overwhelming enthusiasm landed on deaf ears. In fact it landed on ears that were so deaf it discouraged me. I was told by my preacher, “That’s great, but you need a mentor.” Which was just another way of saying you need an accountability partner. But the amazing thing was I didn’t. I didn’t have a single thought in my mind that would drive me back to pornography. It was incredible. The guy the church was sending all the men to with this problem of pornography totally dismissed my claim. Said we needed to get together and talk, and I could tell the way he said it he didn’t believe me. So I began to think maybe I was wrong, maybe it had nothing to do with the TV after all. These people surely knew more than I did. Let me tell you when you stop watching TV you become an outcast in this society. You suddenly have nothing to talk to your co-workers about. “How about that game last night?” or “Did you see who won on ‘American Idol’ lat night?” When you tell people you’ve stopped watching TV they’re going to want to know why. What do you tell them? “Well you see I have a pornography addiction and the TV triggers it.” Yah, right, your going to tell them you’re a pornography addict and the TV is the cause of it. If you are so bold as to tell people be prepared for comments like, “He is really out there.” It is total foolishness to people. But what is even rougher is when you tell your family and they don’t support you either. I told my wife all about my new found freedom, but she couldn’t understand it so she didn’t support me. I told her I wanted to get rid of the TV all together. “But what are the kids going to do? And you know how much I like watching HGTV.” I became an outcast in my own family. While they were in the other room watching TV, I was stuck off in another room reading. This is one of those twist you just have to scratch your head about. I started watching TV again when I wanted to see who won the presidential election. I was just going to watch it one night and see if Bush or Gore won. Well you know the story, it took nearly six months for the election to finally be settled and I was hooked again. All those old desires began to surface again and I was back to square one. But this was my first experience of how influential media could be. I tried after that to re-create the experience by not watching TV again, but it never worked. I simply chalked it up to the people at church being right, it was all just a fantasy, some kind of weird fluke that could never be re-created. So I was back with the same old compulsions. All that enthusiasm was gone. No one believed me anyway so all that enthusiasm was really wasted anyway. My next experience of freedom was while attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with a friend of mine. I wanted to be supportive of his attempt to kick his addiction so I told him I would meet him at the church every Thursday and go to the meetings with him. The church I was attending at the time had started what they were calling Barnabas Groups, where people with addictions and other problems could receive lay counseling and have a support group to help them cope. Low and behold as I attended these meetings with my friend, my addiction to pornography became manageable. It wasn’t the same kind of freedom as I had experienced before, but it did give me some control over my compulsions. I went about a year without one failure. But again it happened and I was again back to square one. It was like I had never left it. I had become very close to the people in the AA group though, I really loved them to death. It is the one place in the church where people truly confess their sins and so I confessed mine as well. The night I confessed to the group I had looked at pornography one of the group leaders, who happened to be a woman, said I had totally changed her perception of pornography addicts. I think she had had some bad experiences in her past with this sin, but she said I had made a very positive impression on her. I think she was trying to be encouraging to me, but it was kind of a back handed complement, and I let Satan use it to remove me from the group. I justified it by telling myself I didn’t want to be a problem for the women in the group. I met the co-leader of the group a few months later and she begged me to return, said she didn’t mean to hurt me and asked me to come back. So I did. She even arranged for the Elders of the church to pray over me, which I submitted myself to whole heartedly. I was prepared to do anything to get rid of this addiction. I realized after my failure that I needed more specific counseling than the Alcoholics Anonymous group could give. So I started attending a group on Thursday nights specifically for men with a pornography addiction. The group was in its basic construction like the AA meetings. But had more specific information about what triggers our compulsions. How as men we need to realize the compulsion starts long before the actual act. There was a lot of talk about how shame and guilt drive us to this behavior and how it is a vicious cycle. Again I found help for a while. After attending the pornography group for a very short time I became a born leader you might say. The leader of the group was not an addict himself and I was very good at relating to the guys when he couldn’t. I did what my preacher had originally told me I should do and got an accountability partner, as well as became one for many of the guys in our group. At one point I was meeting a different guy almost every day of the week. We’d discuss various problems they were having and I’d try and help them. The thing that was always heart breaking in these groups was how the guys marriage’s were suffering. Every week it was like a broken record of problems in their marriages. Some of the guys where even getting counseling with their wives, but the problems persisted year after year. Their wives just couldn’t trust them. Again this freedom I felt in this group was not like the TV fast. I could control my addiction for longer periods of time but the problem never went away. It was often a daily struggle. In my book I’ll tell you why I believe this is and why twelve step programs for pornography addiction often don’t work, at least long term. And this goes for accountability partners as well. Accountability partners are great when you have things under control. However they’re not so great when you don’t, and that is supposedly when you need them most. But try telling your group or partner after a year of success you are back at square one and nothing is working. It’s hard to do, and really it is pointless. What are they going to tell you you don’t already know after a year. So we just lie about it. I’ve seen it happen several times. One guy in our group had been going there for years, and just out of the blue, got up and told us he had been lying to us for six or seven months. If your wife and kids, and your marriage, aren’t important enough to you to stop, how in the world is an accountability partner going to stop you. Think about it. It is complete naivety. Which is how most churches are dealing with this problem. If there is one thing I know for certain, men involved in pornography are expert liars. They have been doing it all their lives when it come to this sin. Which brings me to my next bad experience. I was so stoked about my successes in the group meetings and accountability partner thing, at least in the beginning, that I went to every minister in our large church and talked to them about what we should be doing to stop this problem. Nothing, no response. I got people shaking their heads in agreement with me that something needed to be done, but no action. Even the Barnabas group headed by the counseling center was frustrated that out of a church of two thousand only myself and one other guy attended the classes. They just weren’t promoted. All the men there were from other churches, and there were only a hand full them. All the men were there because their wives had caught them. As I talked to the various ministers I tried to be very careful at first not to tell them what to do. I had suggestions for each department, but I wanted to get their take on things and see what they were thinking and doing. It was always someone else is taking care of this problem. The Barnabas groups for instance were dealing with it. But we only had two people from our church in that group. The only other way of dealing with this problem was to send them to one man in the church that was counseling people with this problem, and no one had any idea how many men that was. When I ask this one man counseling phenomenon how many men from our church he was counseling it was way below what the ministers had told me. I was getting absolutely nowhere. I thought I’ll meet with one of those Elders that prayed over me, he’ll surely see we need to be doing more. No. He told me everyone wants to make their problem a priority, and there are more problems than just pornography. I got young youth ministers that had no idea how to handle this issue. It was even a problem for them. Some Bible College’s that our training our youth leaders don’t even acknowledge pornography as being a problem. Even when I showed them the staggering figures of how many men were having a problem from a Promise Keeper’s survey, 62%¾ it fell on deaf ears. It was the last straw. By that time the meetings and accountability partner weren’t working anyway. I stopped going to the group meetings, they weren’t helping me at this point anyway and I couldn’t continue the lie that they were effective. I could see it in many of the guys eyes and those I meet with in private that it wasn’t working for them either. I stopped meeting with my accountability partner too, you can only say I failed again this week so many times. My life was coming apart at the seams. Not only had all my attempts at fixing things failed, my father-in-law, who I admired very much, was dying of prostate cancer, my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor and my wife, unbeknownst to me, was getting ready to leave me. I remember the only thing that helped me get through those times was a book on grace that said, “God will put more on us than we can handle to show us we need Him.” Well I acknowledged I needed him, it was the only way I could survive such pressure. Now for the real twist in this story. If you can’t get the truth in the church God will find a way to get it to you. My wife and I had been separated for about a year and I decided I was going to check-out one of these internet dating things, which led to finding an internet dating guru. One of these guys that will teach you how to pick-up women. My wife had already told me that our getting back together was never going to happen, so I thought what do I have to loose. At least that’s how I justified it at the time. By that point I wasn’t even attending church. I felt like a total outcast. All the leaders knew why my wife had separated from me and I just couldn’t face them anymore after going on such a campaign for change. I mean I was even confrontational, which is unbelievable for me. I wanted them to do something about this problem so bad I wasn’t going to stop pestering them until they did. Which of coarse I did stop pestering them, in fact I totally dropped off the face of the earth as far as they were concerned. I had become so disgusted with the church’s lack of understanding of what was going on in men’s lives, and there seeming lack of care I couldn’t go anymore. And that’s when it happened. It was like the pieces of a puzzle all falling into place. I was listening to one of these internet dating guys do an interview with another dating expert and he was talking about the social matrix, and how our society had put women up so high men were literally afraid of them. His program was called “Natural Game.” He claimed to be able to teach men how to conquer their fears by realizing that our culture had changed what a woman’s true sexuality was into blond hair, blue eyes and nice T&A. He advocated reprogramming ourselves to see a woman’s natural beauty by eliminating the media in our lives that was suppressing a woman’s natural beauty. Now how you might be say how could a guy like this know this? He definitely wasn’t a Christian, but he made more sense when it came to what was going on in our culture than any Christian I had ever read or heard. He knew it because he had done what I had done. He had stepped out of the matrix. He had been traveling to third world countries and had saw women in a totally different way. He saw women reacting to men instead of the other way around. It was a totally different experience than what he was seeing here. Men in these other countries were the stimulus for women, where as in our culture it was the other way around. Now women were the stimulus men were being programmed to respond to. I have to give Rion Williams credit for much of my insight in this area. He had opened a door for me the church had slammed. I had thought when I came back from California about all this, but was so totally discouraged in following it that I had given up on it. Rion Williams though had a better understanding of the problem than the church did, although his ultimate goal, which was to have sex with women, was not where I was going to take this thinking. But still he had seen the truth. He often talks about respecting women and how sex should never be on your mind when trying to meet and talk to women. Just wanting to get to know them for who they really are should be all the motivation a man needs. My second big discovery came when watching the movie, “The Matrix.” I loved the first one, hated all the rest. Rion Williams had talked some about this movie in his program which I bought, (I don’t recommend it, but God used it) and how it related to this problem of our cultures redefinition of a woman’s sexuality. So I thought I needed to refresh my memory and I went out and rented it. There was one question Morpheus asks Neo that opened a completely new world to me. It was about fate. He asked Neo if he believed in fate. I had no idea how important that question would become in my life, and I had not even an inkling that fate and forgiveness were so intimately woven together. Forgiveness is such a powerful thing, but we don’t understand it. Not in my forty some years as a Christian had I had forgiveness explained to me in such a way that I could accept it. When I let myself follow this road, which Francis Schaffer had taught me to do, I didn’t find the hopelessness he had found, but a new fresh road that led to a rational acceptance of forgiveness. The Holy Spirit did some overtime work when it came to this area. I couldn’t sleep, I was constantly getting out of bed and sitting at my computer pounding away. Day and night for weeks this went on, until I finally felt like I understood it. It was like a huge wait had been lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t have to listen to all those Christians that were telling me I was being arrogant by not accepting what God had done for me. “If God can forgive you aren’t you saying you are better than God by not forgiving yourself?” That question was finally put to rest in my mind. And as to the issue of arrogance, how could we forgive ourselves if what we have done, what we have done, required the Son of God to be nailed to the cross. The arrogance is really found in those that think their sins are forgivable in the way most Christians think about what Christ has done. I am excited again! I’m not letting the church this time dampen that enthusiasm because I know it is real and I know the Holy Spirit is leading me. That doesn’t mean that everything I say is from God, but I think enough of it is to set us free. I know it has worked for me and others. It is working for me like that first hiking trip, complete freedom. No more twelve step programs, accountability partners, etc. because there is no need for them. I’ve changed, I no longer am an addict. This may be shocking news for the church today, but men really can be men of integrity without someone watching their every move. I want this for you with all my heart and I hope my book will lead you down the same path of freedom as well. May God bless you richly in this life when everything that has happened to you seems as if it was meant for bad. And may you take this message to other men and save lives. In Christ’s service, Tim Wemple