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So was it reasonable to expect a sudden cure from homosexuality? Would God sanctify me the way I turn on a light switch? He could have—but that is not what he is doing. While I know that my heart has been washed clean by the blood of Jesus, I am on a journey of healing. Sanctification is a process. I am being transformed by the renewing of my mind. New mental channels are being etched. I am learning new ways of dealing with pain. Each day, I face the challenge of making choices that, with God's help, will slowly turn this central part of me into the man that God intended me to be all along.

For me, every day is a choice of obedience. I constantly need to choose the good. God tells me to bring every thought into captivity, to make no provision for the flesh, to not go near the door of sin's house. Jesus tells me that if my right eye offends me, I must pluck it out. For years, I had a half-hearted commitment to that kind of obedience. I was like the man in the cartoon leaving an adult bookstore. The caption reads, "I can't understand why I have so much trouble with thoughts of lust."

I finally realized that I needed to stop feeding the fire of lust. For me, that means saying no to things that tempt me: Don't channel surf. Don't watch television when no one else is present. Don't check out the male models in the Sunday paper. Don't go near the newsstand. Don't enter video stores or bookstores without my wife. Don't have access to the internet.

I would like a quick fix. I want a magic formula. But instead, God tells me, "Obey!" Every day, I must employ his power to put to death whatever belongs to my lower nature. No, these decisions haven't turned me around overnight, but when I stopped making provision for my lust and began to practice obedience, I was surprised that my sexual fantasies ebbed considerably. I shouldn't have been. Interestingly enough, I also began to find my wife more attractive, and my sexual drive began to be channeled toward her.

Amid this process, I've discovered how I had been using sexual fantasy to deal with pain. It was time for me to grow up. Part of this has involved learning to deal with stress, anger, and frustration in responsible ways.

In my sophomore year, I mustered up enough courage to make an appointment at the counseling center of my Christian college. The counselor was pretty clueless. First he sent me to assertiveness training. Then one day he asked what I thought of my private parts. I don't think he was trying to be weird, but I felt very uncomfortable and violated. I didn't return.

As time passed, my struggle with pornography intensified. Although I knew it was destructive, I couldn't seem to stop. The dissonance between claiming to be a Christian and absorbing sinful images in adult bookstores was more than I could take.

I was convicted enough to see another Christian counselor. He listened as I confessed. I saw him fumbling for a solution. He suggested I go back to the bookstore with a bag full of quarters and use as many as I needed in the viewing booth to "get it out of my system." I knew this Christian counselor had no more answers than I did.

A few years later, a new counselor suggested that I start dating. He gave me a false dream that somehow life would fix itself if I simply started acting like a heterosexual. I soon learned that acting as if life was normal didn't make it so. The struggle didn't go away. I got married, and my life became more complicated and stressful.

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April 2007, Vol. 51, No. 4