“Reginald’s” Testimony

On June 5th, 2019 I embarked on the most critical journey of my Christian walk and, indeed, my lifetime: a journey back to purity of heart. A quote from the Wisdom of Oswald Chambers captures for me, the essence of where I was spiritually on that day and how important it was to proceed:  “When a man’s heart is right with God the mysterious utterances of the Bible are spirit and life to him. Spiritual truth is discernible only to a pure heart, not to a keen intellect. It is not a question of profundity of intellect, but of purity of heart.  I always had a propensity to approach things from a detached, intellectual perspective, taking what I found useful and discarding the rest. In doing so, as a “believer” who accepted Christ into his heart in 1991 and was baptized in 1992, I played this dangerous game and I ended up spiritually dead.  My Christian marriage of 17 years was dead, and my soul was separated from God – I was an adherent to the convictions of King David in his Psalm 51, and verse 10 had special significance for me. Although I had not spilled a drop of human blood, I was living in denial of the fact that I was intentionally and deliberately killing the Holy Spirit within me by justifying my sexual addiction to pornography and masturbation with the statement that “I was not hurting anyone.”  The fact is, I had proof-positive evidence that the wages of sin is death: my wife’s trust and self-esteem was crushed, my moral conscience was dead and I was living a hypocritical life – even as I held a position as a staff member with responsibility over the congregation of my church.  Another Oswald Chambers Wisdom quote is appropriate here: “It is not what a man does that is of final importance, but what he is in what he does. The atmosphere produced by a man, much more than his activities, has the lasting influence.”

For the first time in my life, I recognized that I needed help and it was non-existent in my local church and counselling community, Christian and secular.  But God directed my path to Pureheart Ministries in April 2019, and I am so grateful for the redemptive and transformative leadership of Tim Davis and the curriculum and counselling he has developed that has equipped me to live pure and holy once again.

When I was accepted into Pureheart Ministries, I made a commitment to “stop-on-a-dime” and do the work necessary to regain a right relationship with Jesus.  Little did I know that it would tear the cover off my sinful thinking and behavior while testing my integrity and faith to the fullest.

My history began in the mid-1940’s, born in Harlem and raised in a NYC Housing project. While there were probably some very low expectations for me at that time, both my parents were in my life and quite protective of me, the second of three children, born with a physical “affliction” that was destined to wreak havoc in my physical and psychological development, even though it was not visible to the eye.  I was born with undescended testicles and nobody that I depended upon appeared to pay much attention to it until I was 12 years old. By that time, the damage to those organs caused by the body heat of my abdominal area was done, and after 4 surgeries they were removed to avoid the significant potential for testicular cancer. I was 15 years old, entering puberty and just beginning to understand the impact of that affliction on the rest of my life. I did not develop the way my peers did, but they didn’t know why, and neither did I.  In essence, I had the male equivalent of a hysterectomy. My self-esteem took a mammoth hit and from that point of impact until I became a Christian I never felt like a “normal” person with any value or worth. To this date I have never met anyone who had the same affliction as I had, and I felt isolated, quietly enduring many unknowing, yet  cruel jokes and insults about my condition (which they knew nothing of) that angered me and drove me to bottle it up and become an introvert with a gaping hole in my heart and my mind. Because the people who were taking care of my medical needs were keenly aware of what might be ahead for me, they strongly suggested that I undergo psychotherapy to prevent any thoughts of, or attempts at, self-destruction or suicide. And even though I didn’t know it, God’s Grace and Favor kept me.  Hallelujah!

That was a low point in my life. I perceived that I was never fully accepted by the guys my age and I never felt acceptance from girls I might have been interested in because of my “baby-face” exterior. The pain of this was magnified in October 1964 when I had to report for the military draft where I failed the physical and was classified as 4F because my condition was described as a “liability on the battlefield.”  I was devastated. My chance to “prove” my masculinity was gone in an instant.  I've lived with that devastation all my adult life, facing female rejection while evading and lying to avoid my inadequacies.  As an introvert, I was an avid reader, doing well academically, learning about my affliction in encyclopedias and extremely frustrated by rejection and isolation which led me to engage in the consumption of steamy/trashy romance paperbacks, voyeurism, “graduating” to X-rated adult magazines and porn movies, “hallway sex” and masturbating to all of them. 

I brought this “lifestyle” into my college years and although I was in an environment of rampant pre-marital sex, I remained “involuntarily” disengaged, even though I had gained some popularity on campus through my fraternal affiliations, receiving a plethora of overt sexual offers which I managed to avoid, but with great frustration.  I turned to drinking to drown my depression and there was one female friend who, though among those women who offered, “nursed” me through that rough patch, only to watch me turn my back on her when I finally scored with one of the more popular women on campus who later became my wife.  And although we had an active, “porn-enhanced,” sexual life, when my friend and I had an extramarital affair after the birth of my first son, the marriage ended in divorce.

I went through a 30 year period from 1961 through 1991, what I call my “Before Christ’ period, where I was angry with anyone and everyone who “did this to me” – including God - and I deliberately turned to the world’s standards and away from God. I was among the lost, living unholy, and ignoring my moral compass though not enough to get in the kind of trouble that would ruin my reputation, bring dishonor and disgrace to my family or get me killed. 

By then, I was on my second marriage – and it was failing, again because of my infidelity, just like the first.  It was then that I was invited to church by a friend and a year later, in July 1992, baptized after accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  My level of commitment and growth, however, was superficially intellectual at best.  I played with the intellectual pursuit of God when He commands us to worship Him in Spirit and in Truth.  I was the epitome of a “fake Christian” whose “private life” was spiraling out of control – and I couldn’t stop it on my own strength.  When it was clear that I was going to lose my third wife, I was at the bottom of the valley of the shadow of death and not even my Pastor was willing or able to help because I kept it all hidden out of shame; he always said “...sin will shut your mouth....”  Despite efforts to reconcile with my wife, I believe I had done such irreparable damage to her as a person, that her heart hardened to the point of unbelief and lack of trust in me, and she asked for a divorce and rejected my efforts at reconciliation.  While I believed - and still believe - that the Blood of Jesus, which has the power to reconcile man to God also has the power to reconcile man to (wo)man, the unstable foundation of doubt upon which our marriage was built, when combined with the utter personal devaluation she suffered at my hand, was insufficient to sustain it through the trials and tribulations of my life of Pornography, Erotic Material, Masturbation, Acting Out (PEMA).  Though I never wanted a divorce, her decision to “move forward” with another man in her life gave rise to a Matthew 5:32 dissolution of our marriage.

But God made a way when there seemed to be no way – Pureheart Ministries.  Today, I am delighted to report that I have been PEMA free since June 5, 2019!  From a lifetime estimate of nearly 88,000 Masturbations to “zero,” “zilch,” “nada” incidents of masturbation or ANY of those events leading up to and/or triggering it. So, although I originally vowed to do this without the aid of filters (initially, I called them “crutches”), I decided to install Covenant Eyes™ when I took on a minister in my church as a local accountability partner, as an added incentive to ensure complete transparency.  It wasn’t without struggles, however.  I had to be deliberate and intentional about taking my thoughts into captivity to the obedience of Christ (1 Cor 10: 3-5) and to “checking in” and remaining accountable to my Band Of Brothers (BOB).  It was a new standard, something that had been missing in my most of my adult life and for all the years of my addiction, but that I now know is indispensable. To God be the glory.

The Pureheart Counseling Processes Helped Me Most were:

·         Brutal Honesty, Constructively Blunt Counseling and Absolute Confidentiality

·         Accountability Partnerships: Local and BOB

·         Commitment to imposed lifestyle changes, like the discipline of living celibate for a year, so I could focus on renewing my relationship with God not pleasing women; violations could result in tangible consequences or expulsion from group

·         Warfare Analogies – Seeing this journey as spiritual warfare

·         Group Discussions of Homework:  Critiques and Support

·         Weekly BOB “check-in”

Without any hesitation, I would highly recommend Pureheart Ministries to others.  In fact, I already have!!!