Introduction
Some time ago I met a member of a local church and asked him how he became a Christian. He told me how God had helped him overcome a dissolute life of alcohol and drugs. The story was so compelling that I asked if I could put his testimony on my web site. He was happy for me to do so. We got together and he shared his testimony. At the end of his testimony he then said he had something to tell me that he had left out of the story. It turned out that he had been subject to a terrible sexual addiction and that his life of alcohol and drugs was, to a real degree, a response to his affliction. We then decided to include his sexual addiction in the testimony. I also decided to change all the names in the testimony to guard his privacy. For that reason, I decided to give him the name of “Charles.” In what follows below, I have written it pretty much as he narrated it to me, simply editing it a bit to make it clear and putting it in the third person. Once written, Charles verified that the version posted here is completely accurate.
Charles’ Testimony
Charles was born in 1956, the fourth child of a family of six. One of his older sisters died about the time he was born. His parents were very strict. They weren’t wealthy, but they were a pretty happy family. When mad, his parents would beat the kids with whatever came to hand, from horse bridles to flyswatter handles, to everything under the sun. They lived in the country and his dad was in the plumbing and electrical business. His dad was very generous. He gave away more than he ever collected. When his customers were poor, he would not charge them for his services. His dad hired workers to dig ditches and do other manual labor, and Charles helped out as well. These workers sodomized Charles.
His parents divorced when Charles was ten or eleven and the grandmother on dad’s side came to live with his dad. Charles and his brothers and sisters stayed with his dad and grandmother. The children were not allowed to talk to their mom. This was difficult for Charles, but he and the other kids would sneak out and call her. She was the one who initiated the divorce, in part, because her husband did not provide the things she wanted in life. After the divorce, Charles’ father stalked his mother for years. After a while, the father remarried and quit stalking her after that. Meanwhile, his mom started living with Martin, a black man, and she was very happy. No one in the family was allowed to know about Martin. Had anyone found out, she would have been shunned. When Charles was sixteen, he went to live with his mom and Martin, and lived with them until he was twenty-one. Charles really liked Martin and thought the world of him. He was a cool guy who knew a lot of famous singers. He also worked for NASA and owned a photographic company. At that time, his mom and Martin were living right in the middle of the homosexual community and Charles began the homosexual life style. That is when it flared and grew and took over. He dated a girl for high school purposes, but the real thing was the sex with guys.
After he graduated from high school, Charles got a scholarship for nursing, but his parents said no. They wanted him to go into the electrical business with his uncle. He did so but hated every minute of it. He became an apprentice electrician, but finally quit and told his mom he couldn’t do it any more. He messed around for a year or two, then joined the Navy at the age of 24 and moved to Jacksonville. All of the homosexual life style was there, a person just needed to know where to go, what clubs to go to. There were two clubs downtown, and then one near NAS JAX. The two clubs downtown are still there. They encourage young people to go there. They have a teenager’s night to bring the kids in. The older men like sex with them. These kids do not know how dangerous it is to toy with such behavior. By this time his family was getting worried about him. He was drinking and getting into drugs. He had a cousin who sold pot. He didn’t much like pot. He liked the pills better, the chemicals. As time went on, he continued his wicked life style of doing drugs and drinking. Part of the reason for the drinking and drugs was his guilt and shame for his homosexual life style which continued unabated. He could not see how to get out of it, the drive for homosexual sex was extremely strong. It gnawed at him. It was awful. He hated it, a love/hate relationship thing. He tried to keep it out of the military. A few times he was unable to do so since the passion was so overwhelming. At one point he went to an unauthorized leave party. A marine was leaving for California for three weeks without permission and his friends were celebrating. Charles brought a bottle of Jack Black and someone laced it with PCP, a psychotic drug. This was very dangerous. He drank it. Then he fell, broke both his wrists and passed out. They called an ambulance and he was carried to the Navy Air Station hospital where he remembers nothing about the next two weeks. After he became conscious, he ran into one of the nurses in the chow line. She said he had talked them into unstrapping him, at which point he ran away naked, and they chased him around the hospital. He didn’t remember that. He did, however, remember seeing himself in the bed as if he were located in the upper corner of the room looking down on himself. The doctors and nurses were doing things to him. His heart had stopped and they were trying to revive him. He spent September through December in NAS JAX hospital in rehab, although he was still drinking and doing drugs. He had to learn to read again, along with basic functions like walking and talking. There were many difficulties.
Then they put him in the AA program. The doctor told him that if he did not quit his drugs and drinking, he would be dead within a year. He didn’t care. He met Dave, his closest friend in AA, and told him what the doctor had said. He also met Joan and Paul who became his friends. They were Christians and had a ministry to people in the navy. They just suddenly showed up in his life and they were in his face. He told Dave that he was still drinking and doing black hash. He was doing it in the back room and spraying deodorant around the place to cover the smell. He was doing a lot of stupid things as well. Then Dave, at an AA meeting, told the members what Charles was doing. Charles became enraged. They kicked him out of AA. He then went back to the training squadron and they said if he messed up one more time he would get a dishonorable discharge. But he didn’t care.
He went with some friends to see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. He was high, on alcohol and drugs. It was the most frightening experience of his life, scared him to death. It triggered something in him. He ended up lost in the middle of the night. He was told later that he was running around banging on doors and saying that they had killed his friends. Some people called the police who found him face down in a ditch. He was then transported to Shands, Jacksonville which was a university hospital at the time. He knew he was going to be given a dishonorable discharge, so he came up with a scheme. He went to the chaplain’s office and asked them to find out where his truck was. He had no clue as to its whereabouts or how to get it back. They found the truck and got it back for him. He pretended to be on good behavior. The navy thought he had made a turn around, so they put him in the chaplain’s office to help with office work. In the meantime, Dave and Joan were still talking to him, getting in his life, and he was blowing them off. Then Christmas came. They kept talking to him about God. He got tired of their talking about God and told them when he wanted to know about God he would ask them. Joan said that was cool, that was fine. She had a natural peace about her, a peace, a joy, the neatest thing, and he wanted that. He was getting tired of drinking and everything else. That Christmas Eve, sitting in his truck, she led him to the Lord. They talked, and then he dropped her off at her house. Then he went back to the barracks and decided to test God to see if God was real. So he gave his roommates some acid and took some himself. Nothing happened. The acid had no effect on him. He was stunned, his roomies were tripping out. He called Joan and they went to Famous Amos on Normandy and drank coffee all night long and talked. It was so exciting. He told the chaplain that he had gotten saved so he arranged for Charles to be baptized in December of 1981. Joan and Paul introduced him to Mark Johnson who would later become one of his closest and dearest friends. They are still friends to this day. In fact, he was at Mark’s house last night. In January he was shipped overseas, from January to May. When he came back, his Christian friends were all waiting for him when he stepped off the boat. He had the opportunity to become roommates with Mark and Paul. He was afraid to do so for fear that he would have sex with them, but decided to trust God.
After he became a Christian, he still had powerful homosexual urges, but he gave up the drugs and the alcohol. God immediately relieved him of the desire for drugs and alcohol, but not for homosexual sex. He kept hoping God would deliver him of that as well. He would write Joan long letters telling her about it. When he went overseas, he would pray and pray asking for protection and deliverance, but it never came. He ended up getting busted, caught in a predicament, caught with a guy in a public place. The Jacksonville police department caught him. The guys in his squadron became threatened and they threatened him back. The CO called him in and asked if he wanted to stay or leave the navy. Charles was very afraid that the guys were going to kill him. He got out of the navy with an “other than honorable discharge.”
By this time he was going to church, but he could not figure out why he was still having the desires and urges. Then he heard about the healing ministry at a nearby church. One of the counselors there did prayer counseling with him and this became the road to healing. The day Charles was discharged from the navy, he met Mary. He knew he was going to marry her. He went back and told Mark, Paul, and Joan about Mary. Two years to the day after he met her, they were married. It was a very long process; the pastor prayed with him and counseled him, helping him not to slip and fall.
As of this moment, he cannot say that he is completely healed, but he has been made whole. Recently he had to leave the church he had been in because its leadership affirmed homosexual unions. Some friends of his were mad at him for leaving, but he explained how he had fought so long and hard for his freedom; he could not stay in a church that affirmed the homosexual life. What they believe made everything he did a lie, all of it a lie. God either is or is not. Now they are very understanding.
To this day he must guard himself. He does not let himself work with teenagers, nor does he go to clubs, or movies that portray homosexual behaviors. He never puts himself in any situation that glorifies that sin, and he has given up most TV. Homosexuality is like alcoholism; he has to guard against it. He had to decide what is real and true. He believes that if he did not have Mary and God in his life, he would probably have died years ago with some hideous disease. Those who say they are born homosexual are wrong. It is a choice you make. You either want to be or not want to be. He knew it was wrong, but it was a drive and urge beyond anything he could control. He could not get out of it, but God got him out of it. God delivered him, set him free, made him whole, and enabled him to have a sexual relationship with his wife. God gave her to him. He learned what being a real man was about. He loved making love to her and found her very attractive. He and Mary have two kids. He looks forward to his times with her. He knows that he has been set free, made whole, but must exercise vigilance.
When he was living his wicked life, his grandmother and aunts prayed for him on their knees constantly. It was a great joy for him to call them and say that he had become a Christian. Some of his uncles had been alcoholics and they also became Christian. The family turned a corner; the destruction of generations was broken. His aunts, uncles, cousins were in hell, and many of them have become Christians. Charles was in hell. It was hell on earth. You cannot imagine what real hell is like. He is not a perfect Christian. He still fights with Mary and the kids, but he knows that God is always there, always protecting him. Only when he decides to go his own way, then will God say, “Do as you please.” He always wanted one of those television deliverances where you are utterly free instantly, but he has to walk daily with God. His church family is very important to him. His church is all he has, and he does not want to lose them. The Christian life is like a cow path, very narrow with nice green grass on all sides.
