My life is a ruin
Question:
My friend, I don't know where to begin. I have prayed to the Lord for wisdom. I don't know where, but I'll just begin.
As a child, I grew up very lonely. I later found out I have autism, though I am high-functioning. As I got older, I had to go to preschool, where I was relentlessly bullied, yet I suffered in silence. This was my story for the rest of school: bullied every day, ignored, and never chosen. Nobody was a friend; I was just alone. It's all I know. Every night, I had internal panic attacks, not wanting to go to school, but I kept everything inside, silently crying.
This was bad enough, but a cousin of mine and I discovered porn when I was just 8 or 9 years old. He and I did homosexual things, but we had no intercourse. However, later that year, he raped me in my room, and I was just silent as I always was afraid of what others would say or think. I remember I tried getting him to have intercourse with me again later that month, thinking that It might take the feeling away of dirtiness, but it didn't help. I went to high school. His sister and I fooled around playing at being husband and wife when I was 10. We played sexual stuff, but we never did anything until one day, she asked me if I wanted to do the real thing. I am so thankful I didn't know how a vagina worked, or I would have had sex with her actual penetration.
I am a full-blown porn addict trying to get free. I have fought for so long. I am so tired. I have taken the step of praying for a wife now that I am 27, and the Lord, I don't know why, has shown me how rancid and repulsive a creature I am. I feel so worthless and sometimes think I have no reason to live. No good woman could love me. Just look at me. Addicted to porn, and I am so useless. I could not get free for years. A rape victim and homosexual, I was driven to incest. I cry myself to sleep most nights. I had forgotten all these things for years, and then Jesus opened my eyes.
How foolish of me to pray to the Lord for a wife who loves Him deeply, keeps His commandments deep in her heart, is faithful and loyal and kind, a woman who kept herself pure for the marriage bed and did not throw it all away. Here, I kept my "purity." The Lord was always pulling me from bad situations. Now look at me. I wish for death, but I don't want to die. I feel like even if I do marry and my wife had a sexual past, willingly giving herself away, it breaks me sincerely. I want to go to sleep at night, and I don't wish to wake up. I don't wish to go to work. I want to not feel all of this.
Everyone always rejected me. I was constantly alone. No one wanted to be my friend, nor did anyone ever even reach out to or for me. I hoped that maybe I wouldn't be a second-place comer in marriage, but I am not good material for anything. I am worthless. I should have been killed when I was younger. At least I won't be living in this hell. The God who found me lost and alone at 17 is the God I can't hear any more at 27. Where is He? I need Him, and He is so silent.
Answer:
I'm sorry that you had to experience such a rough childhood. However, there is a choice that you have to make today. Do you let your past rule your life or do you grow from the experiences? "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing" (James 1:2-4).
Pornography is a tough sin to conquer, just as other sins that are based on lust. But difficult does not mean impossible. See
In regard to your loneliness, I suspect that is part of why you chase pornography. You think it will fix the problem, but it makes it worse. But I also wonder where is your church family? Are you a part of a church and attending services?
What your cousin did was grievously sinful, but that doesn't mean it is your sin. I noted that most of these things happened before your teenage years. I suspect that you had not yet started developing and didn't really understand what was going on. This sort of abuse tends to "explode" when the child does develop and realizes the significance of what had happened. It is hard to process knowing something is wrong, but you have done it. Like many abuse victims, you haven't handled it well and spent your adult years blaming yourself for what others had done.
You are not a homosexual. You had committed a homosexual sin. You were a victim of homosexual rape. But that doesn't mean you are the sin. Your cousin tried to get you to commit fornication, but that doesn't mean you are tainted for life. Christianity is about leaving the sinful world and becoming spiritually minded. "Such were some of you; but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God" (I Corinthians 6:11).
"Brethren, I do not regard myself as having laid hold of it yet; but one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:13-14).
