My Secret Struggle

TEMPTATION

Over the years, LEADERSHIP has earned a reputation for addressing ministry issues realistically and redemptively. Occasionally that means tackling a taboo.

Seventeen years ago we published “The War Within,” an anonymous minister’s battle with lust and voyeurism. With its realistic depiction of sexual temptation, it quickly became one of our most controversial—and most requested—articles.

Nearly two decades later, sexual temptations in various forms continue to plague those in ministry. The following is one pastor’s lengthy struggle to overcome homosexual thoughts and desires. Like “The War Within,” this is a straightforward account of a sensitive subject, but we believe its publication could be a first step in helping other Christian leaders who are privately facing a similar struggle.

Some days the urge to fantasize wasn’t so bad. I’d be engrossed in my work, and the thoughts wouldn’t even enter my head. Those were the times that I loved being a pastor. I relished the privilege of reaching out to others and sensed that God used me to touch hurting lives.

But other days it took all I had to stay focused on ministry. The feelings would creep into my mind, stirred up by a muscular physique on the street or a handsome face in a restaurant. I’d pray and try to quash the thoughts right there, but often they grew too great, too pleasurable. Those were the times I hated being a pastor. I despised the lie I was living.

My life and ministry were a tangled mess. On the surface I was a respected church leader, married to a beautiful woman, with a wonderful family. Inside, I was an entirely different person, consumed by homosexual desires.

Sunday mornings were particularly distressing. How does a so-called man of God enter the pulpit and preach with integrity and conviction about becoming a new creation when his own life feels so stained and hopeless? Often I would gaze over the congregation and think, If only you people knew what I was really like, what I struggle with every day, the kinds of thoughts I entertained this week …

One day I drove to a distant town to meet with a group of fellow pastors in my denomination. We sat in a conference room discussing areas in our region that would be ideal for new church plants. But as we talked demographics and strategies, I fought to block out recurring images of pornography, images that had been etched into my mind from repeated viewings of sexually explicit movies and photos.

On the way home, I took an exit ramp, consulted the Yellow Pages, and within minutes was in an adult video store, perusing the video jackets and glossy magazines, searching for a picture of the perfect man.

Not like the other guys I was raised in a working-class, Christian family. God made it clear that ministry was his path for my life early on. It was not always a welcomed call. I feared it, fought it, pushed it aside. Yet I couldn’t shake it.

Nothing gave me more peace and fulfillment than helping other people and connecting them with their Creator. I was very involved in my youth group, a regular volunteer for mission trips, a tireless camp counselor during the summers. Ministry was my joy—the one thing that made me feel whole.

Ironically, my call to ministry coincided with the emergence of my homosexual struggle. As a young boy, I had a great curiosity about the male body. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because my father, who worked two jobs, was not around much. When he was present, he was neither affirming nor affectionate. I was convinced he didn’t love me, and I felt I was a disappointment to him.

As a teenager, I concluded I was different. While I felt some attraction to girls, I was much more attracted to members of my own sex. As I matured physically, those attractions became stronger. I knew, however, that to tell anyone would be a tragic mistake.

When my parents spoke of homosexuals, they used words like “perverted” and “disgusting.”

I read in the newspaper one day a letter written to Ann Landers from someone who was struggling with homosexual feelings. That same evening, Mom referred to the piece. She called the man a “homo” and said people like that were sick in the head. Her words stung. If only she knew that his struggle was her son’s as well.

In high school, there were jokes about “fags” and “queers.” Trying to be one of the guys, I laughed. But within, I ached. I was confused. Why was I attracted to guys? Was I a woman stuck in a man’s body? Was I nature’s mistake?

Many times I went to my room and cried out to God, sometimes in anger, sometimes out of overwhelming helplessness. I pleaded with God to change me. But no matter how passionate my plea, no matter how intense my prayers, I did not change. My same-sex desires did not go away. In my mind, God remained silent.

I found relief through fantasy and masturbation. Though I never had a sexual encounter with another male, I fed my cravings with erotic images from magazines. By the time I graduated from high school, I had been exposed to a relatively small amount of pornography, but my fantasy life was out of control. It was my way of dealing with the loneliness. It gave me an escape, a rush, until the next wave of shame washed over me.

College opened a whole new world of lust and sexual obsession. I was now an adult in a different city. I could get lost. I attended a Christian college but had more freedom than I’d ever known before. Within a few months, I discovered hard-core pornography.

I cried out to God, sometimes in anger, sometimes out of overwhelming helplessness. I pleaded with God to change me.

I continued to fill my mind with new images of men I saw in magazines or viewing booths. But the relief was always temporary. Each time I felt a little more miserable. My shame increased, as well as feelings of inferiority. It was hard to concentrate on schoolwork. Most of the time, life was hell.

First confession Midway through college, I gathered the courage to share my pain with a close friend. We had hit it off well from the beginning. I considered him godly, spiritual, and caring. I respected him for his confidence and what seemed like wisdom beyond his years. I thought it would be safe to tell him my secret.

By this time, the anguish of being an observer in life instead of a participant was more than I could bear. The guys in my dormitory were dating, pursuing dreams, and thinking about their futures. Some were planning to get engaged. I, however, was paralyzed by fear and shame.

The night I decided to share my secret, my friend and I were away at a retreat. It was close to midnight as we lay in our room talking about school and life. The room was dark. He was on the top bunk. I lay on the one beneath. The years of pain and rejection were churning inside me. My body was shaking. I wanted to share my secret, but the words wouldn’t come. How do you tell someone you’re a homosexual? Would he reject me? Would he tell others?

I lay silent, searching for words, any words, other than the “H” word. There were none.

Finally I said, “You know how guys are supposed to be attracted to girls? Well, I’m attracted to … ” I fell silent in fear, but he already knew.

“Guys?” he said.

“Yeah,” I answered after a long pause. Suddenly, my secret was out. For the first time, my soul lay naked before another person.

I don’t remember my roommate’s words that evening, but I remember his kindness. How he prayed for me and accepted me. He gave me a tiny glimpse of what God’s grace and acceptance might be like.

It was a healing moment, but within the next few weeks our friendship deteriorated. I leaned on him too much. I looked to him to help me, to encourage me, to fix me. In the end, my neediness drove him away. Wisely, he encouraged me to see a counselor, which I did. But the counseling was short-term and didn’t do a lot to help me.

A tough calling Despite my feelings of doubt and inadequacy, I continued my journey toward full-time ministry. I went to seminary hoping that somehow I would find the healing I desperately longed for.

Some might argue I shouldn’t have pursued ministry in the first place, that my struggle with homosexuality disqualified me from effective service, and, to some extent, I can appreciate those objections. But then I wonder if those objectors have ever experienced a call from God; the way he supernaturally woos, empowers, and blesses one into his service.

In unmistakable ways—through conversations, encouragement from others, and effectiveness in the ministries I undertook—I knew that becoming a pastor was my destiny. It wasn’t an easy process.

At times I agonized, wondering if I was sanctified enough for this calling. But God continued opening doors to ministry, and, however crippled from my inner battle, I walked through them.

Through most of my seminary career, I managed to resist the urge to pick up pornography. After one instance of giving in to the temptation, I confessed to my pastor. A thoughtful and understanding man, he referred me to a counselor who encouraged me to start dating women. I took his advice to heart. It was a move that would change my life forever.

Trying the knot I soon began seeing a special young woman from my church. Laura (not her real name) was a gentle and caring person, who was always willing to listen to my complaints about Greek exams or 30-page theology papers. We made each other laugh and, in time, became very close.

Still, I didn’t see any reason to tell her my secret. I knew that if our relationship continued to progress, I eventually would have to tell her. But I decided to wait. Perhaps I would find freedom from my struggle before I’d need to reveal it to her.

One evening I succumbed to temptation and visited a liquor store that sold male pornography. This time, though, the guilt was too much for me. I knew Laura saw our relationship as one with long-term potential. The right thing to do, I finally decided, was to stop deceiving her and ‘fess up. She needed to know who I really was.

My confession caught her totally off guard. At first she was afraid. “Why are you attracted to me?” she asked. “What does this mean for our relationship?”

I couldn’t answer her. I encouraged her to talk to our pastor, who was familiar with my situation. They met the following week. He distinguished for her the difference between the condition of homosexuality and the actual sin of acting upon one’s desires. Because I was not acting upon my impulses and only struggled with desires, he believed it was safe to continue with the relationship.

The pastor’s counsel helped assuage Laura’s uneasiness, and we eventually decided to marry. I loved Laura, but I also saw marriage as an important step towards shutting the door on my homosexual self and embracing a new life of public heterosexuality.

By marrying, I hoped those old lusts and desires would gradually fade—they didn’t.

Slowly I realized that this was an awful way to enter a marriage. I bounced from being a good husband to being one who was moody, angry, and depressed. The frustration that came with my inability to resist temptation was taken out on my wife. I blamed her for my problems.

In our intimate times together, I found myself succumbing to thoughts of lust toward men and feeling immense guilt afterwards. Of course, I didn’t tell her that. I knew it would hurt her deeply to discover that I found men more arousing than her.

Ministry tangles Following seminary, I accepted a position at a small but bustling church. I was a competent preacher. Through God’s Spirit, my sermons had an impact. I often heard how God was using particular messages to change people’s lives. I was an effective administrator. I had a reputation for doing things right. And I related well to the members of my congregation.

Pastoral care came easily for me. I was able to empathize with hurting souls (because of my own hurt?), and people opened up to me, often saying, “I didn’t expect to tell you all of this.” One woman, hospitalized with severe depression, told me when I visited her that the first Sunday she met me, she knew I understood pain.

To most people, I was perceived as having it all together, but I struggled fiercely many days just to keep my life together.

For years I remained outwardly faithful to my wife and my ministry. But inwardly, I was committing adultery on a regular basis. Only by God’s grace did I avoid crossing the line and not become involved with another man—and then only because the right situation never presented itself.

For a few moments, pornography gave me an escape, a rush, until the next wave of shame washed over me.

At times I was physically attracted to men I knew in the church. I usually figured these feelings were safe because the guys were straight and there was no potential for becoming involved. I ended one “accountability” friendship because I knew the man had the same struggle as I, and the potential for both of us to fall was there.

Again, I coped with the pain through fantasy and masturbation. Pornography continued to be a constant battle. The temptation to drive by an adult bookstore was there nearly every time I went to a meeting or made a hospital call. Though I seldom went in, it gave me a rush of adrenaline just to ride by.

The struggle was strongest when my wife was out of town. At times the struggle was so strong that I would break out in a sweat and become physically ill.

After yielding, I usually confessed to my wife. It made me feel better; it made her feel worse. I was too wrapped up in myself to realize what it was doing to her as a person, how it was chipping away at her self-esteem and sense of security. She lived in a semi-state of fear that one day someone who knew me would walk into a place and catch me looking at pornography. She imagined me being thrown out of the ministry and our lives being turned upside down.

The breaking point After more than a decade of marriage, and what seemed a lifetime of emotional turmoil, I was near the end of my rope. A moment of lustful indulgence had led me to an adult video store on the outskirts of town.

As was my ritual, I absorbed the crude images and left the store in shame and disgust. But this time, the flood of guilt and frustration felt more acute. It was as if God had given me a glimpse of my pathetic descent from his own perspective. I had to seek help, even if it meant risking that my congregation would find out.

When I got home, I told Laura that I couldn’t keep living this way, that I was going to make an appointment with a parachurch ministry in a nearby city that helped those who struggled with homosexuality. She didn’t know what to think.

As she spoke, fear and anger crept to the surface: “If someone from church finds out, you won’t have a job. What would we do? How would you explain it to the kids?” She fell into a chair and began to cry. “Why can’t you just get your act together and stop this?”

“I don’t know how to stop this,” I fired back. “I’ve tried. If this church can’t handle this, then I don’t want to be a part of this church.”

I continued, tears flowing, “My holiness and our marriage are more important to God than my job. And my holiness and our marriage are starting to become more important to me as well. I need to take the risk.”

Hope at last The counselor I began meeting with wanted me to attend a weekly meeting for people struggling with homosexuality. I resisted for weeks, but I knew I needed to go.

As I drove down the freeway to the first meeting, I was full of doubt. Inside me raged a war unlike anything I had ever experienced. This is the right thing to do. God will take care of you, I reminded myself. But rearing its ugly head was my old nature shouting, “This is stupid ! What if you run into someone you know? What if one of your parishioners is there?”

When I arrived, I wasn’t sure what I would find. What I discovered was a group of men and women who looked like the same people I see at the local Kmart. They looked a lot like me.

The first meeting ended with prayer for each member. We numbered off into groups of four to share our needs and tell the others something about ourselves. To my surprise God had orchestrated the numbering so that the ministry people were in the same group: a pastor’s wife, a former youth pastor, a music director, and myself. I was floored.

At that moment, I knew God was there and that he was pleased I was there. I knew it was going to be okay.

For nearly two years, we learned about shame, temptation, and healing our wounded identities. We discussed what it means to be a man or a woman, and how to develop healthy relationships. We shared with each other our hurts, fears, and failures.

In this setting the tangled mess of my life began to unfold. I was able to lay open my bleeding soul, my unresolved pain, and find understanding, love, and acceptance from people in the same situation. More than that, I began to receive hope that life could be different, that God could heal me.

But there were also times when I wanted to give up. Times when the healing was too slow and painful. I had read the books, been to counseling, and gone for months without looking at pornography, yet something would happen, triggering a relapse into old habits.

One such time, I said to my counselor, “Change is not possible.”

“It’s okay to say this is extremely difficult,” he responded. “But do not say it’s impossible.”

I began to let go of the hurts from the past. I had to offer forgiveness to those who had wounded me—my emotionally distant father, my controlling mother, my insensitive peers, and dozens of others who had wounded me. One by one, in the presence of my kind and loving counselor, I brought them to mind, forgave them, and released my pain to God.

One day my counselor asked, “When you think of God as a father, what do you think of?”

His question caught me off guard. Nobody had ever asked me that before (and if they had, I probably wouldn’t have answered honestly). I thought a moment and said, “He’s distant, and he’s disappointed in me.”

“And how does the Bible describe God, the Father?” my counselor asked.

The words I had learned as a child flooded my mind: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness. He will not always chide, neither will he keep his anger forever. Like as a father pitieth his children so the Lord has pity on those who fear him. For he knows our frame, he remembers we are dust. As far as the east is from the west so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” As I finished, tears welled up in my eyes.

“It sounds to me,” my counselor continued, “like you have an accurate perception of who God is in your head, but not in your heart. You’re seeing your heavenly father like you saw your earthly father. But that’s not what God is like.”

I knew his words were true, but they were so hard to accept. Nevertheless, a little bit of truth penetrated my heart. At that moment, I could clearly see the path to wholeness.

Renewing mind and soul Today my wife and I are on the road to healing. For more than two decades, I feared hurt and rejection. Now, thanks to strong, Christ-centered counseling and the help of a compassionate male mentor who challenged me to make responsible choices and held me accountable when I didn’t, I’ve begun to find true freedom as a man, husband, and minister.

Part of my recovery has involved taking more risks in developing friendships. In doing so I’ve discovered how hungry I was for healthy friendships with other men. As I became comfortable with healthy same-sex relationships, my physical attraction to men diminished.

My relationship with my wife has changed as well. Our intimate times have improved significantly, as I am now able to focus on her exclusively. I have discovered a positive sexual attraction for her that was sorely lacking in the past.

Most important, God has revealed again and again that I need to grow in my relationship with him. As I began spending more time memorizing and meditating on God’s Word, I realized how many lies I had believed all my life—lies about who I was, what gave me worth, and about God’s ability and willingness to change me.

These revelations have not only brought healing and hope to my personal life, but they have injected new excitement into my professional ministry.

I once believed I was a homosexual because of my thoughts and desires. I believed I was stuck in that role and that I should see myself that way. I have since come to know that God sees me in Christ as a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). I am not a homosexual. I am a Christian who struggles at times with homosexual thoughts that have diminished considerably. But that is just a part of who I am. It is not my identity.

I’d be lying if I said this process has been easy, or that I have arrived. It will be a lifetime journey. But God has brought change beyond my wildest dreams. And I know he isn’t finished.

The author of this article is the pastor of a church in the Midwest.

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.