I received the following e-mail from Jana (not her real name):

My friend’s husband has a problem. The worst thing is that this man had given his heart to Jesus and had stopped for a long time. But then he fell into the trap set by Satan again. She told me that when she wakes and sees her husband is not in bed, she knows exactly what is going on.

She says she becomes ice-cold and it feels like her heart stops and then suddenly starts up again, beating in her throat.  Sometimes her husband doesn’t even notice her watching him from the passage. Alone in bed she cries herself to sleep …

I think this is the worst way that a man can hurt his wife … it’s not as if he is cheating on her physically, but he does it every day. He can basically hardly wait until his wife falls asleep to get to the TV.

I don’t think any woman wants to sleep with her husband if he had just been watching other women. I don’t believe any woman wants to feel like a spare tire. As a woman, you want your husband to think you are special and beautiful.  Because when the woman is asleep and her husband jumps into bed and draws her closer, she knows it’s not her making him feel like that. Then that woman feels dirty, used, abused, not good enough, and her heart bleeds inside.

What is he thinking? My friend says she hates being intimate with her husband, because it is not out of love. She doesn’t like him touching her. She becomes colder and colder towards her husband the longer it goes on. She no longer even wants to go out with her family. She feels dead inside.

The poor woman feels there is something very wrong with her because her husband is watching that dirty stuff on TV all the time. She feels like a porcelain doll with a terrible crack and that just one more bump will break her apart. 

It is making her depressed, angry, irritated, miserable, defiant, and her spiritual life is suffering. I wish that man could realise how much he is hurting his wife. Just one minute and he would never do it again in his life …

How do you help a friend in such a situation? It’ll need extremely strong “glue” to heal the cracks or the hurt …

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more honest description of the effect of pornography on a spouse.

Our loving God gets straight to the point: ⁵And that means killing off everything connected with that way of death: sexual promiscuity, impurity, lust, doing whatever you feel like whenever you feel like it, and grabbing whatever attracts your fancy. That’s a life shaped by things and feelings instead of by God.

⁶It’s because of this kind of thing that God is about to explode in anger.

Scripture

Colossians 3:5-6

Reflection

Do you realise what effect pornography has?

Do you have to make a few changes?

How are you going to do it?

Prayer

Father, please help each of us to take your warning seriously. Amen.