Married Life

A big reason I'm writing these blogs is to help sort things out. My interactions with Eve and her insightful comments have already helped a lot. Thanks Eve. Nevertheless I will press on. I need to finish this.

While Maria and I were dating and engaged, I began going to seminary part time. I felt led by God. I wanted to learn about the Bible and what God had to say. I didn't feel called to be a pastor, which is normally why people go to seminary. I did hope to teach people about the bible. Maria agreed with me on this.

After we were married I went to school full time and worked part time. (I had a very understanding boss because he allowed me to work part time at what would normally be a full-time career job.) In a little over two years I had completed most of school.

During the same time we had two children. We wanted children and God blessed us. We were very busy. Maria attended my classes with me sometimes, but stayed home with the children when they were born.

We didn't talk that much or spend too much time together. Maria's Hispanic culture taught her that men were more important than women. She didn't want to disturb my important studying and working. I grew up in a family that didn't talk much, so I thought it was fine and normal. I was even warned at school to pay attention to my family, especially my wife. There was no point in getting a good biblical education and ignoring the God's desire for us to treat our family well and love those around us. I didn't listen very well.

One day Maria caught me staring at a woman. She was devastated and very upset. We had about a year of very uneasy time together. We either didn't talk, or I got yelled at a lot. I did some yelling too, but mostly tried to avoid the conflict.

We went to a Christian counselor. Most of our sessions focused on fixing my problem with looking at women. I was always very nervous. I didn't like talking about my sins. I didn't like talking about feelings. I also was afraid even more bad stuff would come out. The counselor was a very nice older man with some good advice. However, most of it boiled down to "Read your bible and pray more and try harder." That didn't help me get over liking to look at women. Maria eventually didn't want to go anymore and I stopped going too.

I dropped out of school. I had learned most of what I wanted. We were low on money and I needed to work full time. Plus the incongruity of me going to seminary and having a lust problem were too much for us.

Things between Maria and I finally got a little more normal and we had another child. I did a better job of hiding my desire to look at women.

For a while I traveled a lot on business. I would stay up watching movies in my hotel rooms. The movies often contained sex and nudity. Sometimes I even got X-rated fare. I was always too cheap to pay for any, but sometimes it was free on cable. I had no problem with internet porn because this was before the Internet.

After many years we found out about a missionary organization that translated Bibles and helped people learn to read and write. This interested us and we tried joined them. I quit my job and we went to school. My sexual problems seemed to fade into the background. We learned a lot and grew a lot.

However, one of the things we had to do was raise our own support money. I hated it. I hated calling people and asking for money. I felt a lot of pressure to do stuff I was terrible at. Consequently we were having lots of trouble getting enough support to go overseas. I went back to work to support us while we kept trying to raise funds.

At work I passed by an office and saw some coworkers looking at a picture of a naked woman. This prompted me to search our work network for the pictures. I found them and looked at them often.

About this time the internet was developing. I got access at home. I started looking for porn. I got in the habit of staying home from church some nights to look at porn. This allowed me to be home alone so I wouldn't be disturbed. I also stayed up late sometimes.

We still weren't raising money very well. I decided to quit work and trust God for the money we needed and work full-time to raise support. We went on like this for many months and God did take care of us in many ways. However, the pressure on me helped make my sexual problem s worse.

One night I was up late waiting for a porn site to load. This was the bad old dial-up days -- pictures usually took several minutes to load. The screen finally appeared. So did Maria! I quickly turned off the monitor. She asked me what I was doing. I turned back on the screen and kind of bumblingly told her. She was incensed.

I was forced to admit my porn problem to our mission organization and quit. We wrote a regular newsletter to people interested in what we were doing. We wrote a final letter saying we stopped because we couldn't raise enough money.

Maria and my relationship was worse than ever. She said God had audibly told her to get up that night and check out what I was doing. She couldn't believe I'd betray her like that. There was again lots of yelling.