The 22-month discipleship program at Harvest USA helped me in several ways. Each week we learned to become more and more vulnerable with each other, sharing personal failings, past wounds, and current struggles and calling one another to live more obedient to God’s will. We built transparency and trust and prayed for each other knowing we were dependent on God’s strength in our battle with sin. We also encouraged each other to develop a support network at our churches, recognizing how important it was to have others help us when the program was over.

Charles Dickens fans may wince at my blog title. His iconic first line of A Tale of Two Cities says, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and I purposely misquoted it because it aptly describes the inner-wrestling I experienced for almost 40 years.

In all that time, I lived a double life—caught in a cycle of sin and shame, full of self-inflicted guilt, stuck in a rut that I thought was never going to end. But—praise the Lord! —God was working behind the scenes to bring something beautiful from it all.

The Poison of Hidden Sin

For 35 years, most people would have described me as a gregarious and friendly guy. My wife and I seemed to have a happy marriage. We were blessed with a big family. I had a good job. I was a homeschooling father, a leader in my church, lived in a nice home in a beautiful neighborhood, and was always quick with a funny story at social gatherings.

But what most people didn’t know was that I was fighting—and regularly losing—a battle with pornography.

I feared being exposed. I became good at lying to hide my activities. Protecting my secret became all encompassing, and after years of failure, it seemed impossible to overcome. I prayed time and again for forgiveness as well as for strength to win this battle over sin. But at other times I was apathetic, and placated my guilt by telling myself that my small personal sin wasn’t really hurting anyone.

But that was an illusion. My sin wasn’t private. My family—and especially my wife—were affected by my “secret sin.” We kept up appearances of a well-ordered family life, but the reality was that our marriage was in trouble. Despite my wife’s many requests for us to get marriage counseling (which I deflected or ignored) we simply settled into a fairly soulless relationship.

God Steps In

Then, in a matter of months, God stepped in—in a way that was overwhelmingly confusing and disorienting, but which later became evident as his particular care for us. I lost my job, and less than a year later we had to radically downsize and move out of our spacious home of 17 years to a new city 300 miles away. Our new place was a compact church apartment, and my new job was the church custodian. I had been a busy traveling marketing manager, but now I opened and locked the church, mopped floors, changed light bulbs, scrubbed bathrooms, cut grass, trimmed hedges, shoveled snow, moved chairs and tables—and even dug graves!

We slowly began to realize that this devastating “subtraction” was God’s way of removing the things in my life that were holding me back from submitting myself more fully to his will.

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