Crossword

My name is Daniel, and for most of my life I believed that God helped “good people” and that I just wasn’t one of them. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, in a house that never quite felt settled. My dad worked long hours at a factory, came home exhausted, and fell asleep in his recliner with the TV blaring. My mom was a chronic worrier who tried to keep up appearances at church but cried in the kitchen when she thought no one was looking. We went to church almost every Sunday, but I absorbed more about avoiding embarrassment than I ever did about the love of Christ. I knew how to sit still, when to stand, when to bow my head. I did not know how to be honest about the fear and anger building inside of me. By the time I hit high school, I was quietly seething. I wasn’t rebellious in the obvious ways. I didn’t get drunk at parties or run away from home. Instead, I carried a quiet, sarcastic resentment toward everything. I resented my father for never really talking to me. I resented my mother for guilt-tripping me with her tears. I resented our small church for its endless talk of “victory” while I felt nothing but confusion and shame. I resented God for feeling so impossibly far away. On the outside, I looked like a fairly good kid. My grades were decent. I played trumpet in the marching band. Teachers liked me. But I had a secret world unfolding behind the closed door of my bedroom. It began innocently enough with jokes and innuendoes I picked up from friends at school. Then it moved into late-night internet sessions where I clicked deeper and deeper into things I knew were wrong but couldn’t seem to stop watching. Pornography became my hidden drug. It turned into this strange mix of comfort, excitement, and self-loathing. Every time I told myself I would stop, my curiosity and loneliness pulled me right back in. I tried to handle it the way I thought a church kid was supposed to handle sin: by making private promises to God I knew I would break. “This time I’m really serious. This time I won’t go back.” I’d last a few days, maybe a week at most, and then I’d collapse into it again. Over time, the shame attached to my addiction started to shape my identity. I stopped thinking of myself as someone who occasionally sinned and started thinking of myself as a hypocrite, a liar, a fraud. I felt disqualified from anything good. My senior year of high school, my youth group went to a winter retreat. I didn’t want to go. I had already decided that the whole youth group thing was shallow and mostly social. But my mom pushed hard, and I finally gave in because it was easier than arguing. I boarded the bus with my headphones on, determined to simply ride it out and get back home. On the second night of that retreat, the speaker talked about the prodigal son. I had heard that story a thousand times. I could practically quote the parable from memory. I expected another cliché message about “coming home to God.” But he said something I somehow had never fully heard before. He said, “The son’s speech about being unworthy was true in one sense—he really had wasted his father’s money and disgraced the family. But the father didn’t bring him home because of the son’s worthiness. The father brought him home because of the father’s heart.” He paused and then said this: “Some of you are waiting to feel worthy before you come home. You are waiting to fix yourself, to clean up your mess, to conquer your addiction, to become the kind of person you think God helps. But the Father does not tell the son to go clean up first before he can have a robe and a ring. Instead, the father runs to meet him while he still smells like the pig pen.” In that moment, I felt like someone had opened a window in a room I didn’t know I was trapped inside of. I realized I had spent years trying to present God with a cleaned-up version of myself, believing that once I finally got a handle on my secret sin, God would finally accept me. The idea that God wanted me while I was still filthy — that He would run toward me rather than away from me — felt like a foreign language. That night, back in the cabin, I couldn’t sleep. Other guys were joking, scrolling on their phones, whispering about girls back home. I lay there staring at the ceiling. For the first time in my life, I prayed without trying to sound spiritual. I whispered, “God, I’m so tired. I can’t fix myself. I’ve tried. I’m tired of promising You things I can’t deliver. If You really want me as I am, then You’re going to have to come get me, because I’m stuck.” It was not dramatic. No lightning. No visions. But there was a small, steady sense that someone had actually heard me. Not the “future cleaned-up version” of me, but the real me — the one lying there in the dark, addicted and ashamed and exhausted. I’d love to say everything changed instantly, but that’s not how it went. The retreat ended. We went back home. The habits were still there. The temptations were still there. But something underneath had shifted. Instead of running from God after I sinned, I began stumbling toward Him, still guilty, still raw, still broken. Instead of promising Him that I’d do better, I started confessing honestly, “This is what I chose. This is what I want in the moment. I hate that I want it. Please change me.” Around that time, an older man from our church named Steve asked if I wanted to grab coffee. I knew him mostly as “the guy who always smiles” and occasionally helps with ushering. It turned out he had been praying for me for months. Over the next year, he became my first real spiritual mentor. He didn’t lecture me or constantly check my behavior. Instead, he asked questions. He asked about my fears, my loneliness, my anger at my father, my disappointment with church. Eventually, nervously, I told him about the pornography. I expected shock. I expected disappointment. Instead, he nodded slowly and said, “Thank you for trusting me with that. You’re not the first young man I’ve walked with through this, and you won’t be the last. I’m not afraid of your sin. Jesus is not afraid of your sin. He already went to the cross knowing every one of your secret clicks.” Hearing that was like breathing for the first time after being underwater. We began meeting every other week. He showed me scriptures I had read before but never really absorbed — verses about confession, about walking in the light, about the Spirit helping us in our weakness, about God finishing what He starts. He challenged me to bring my sin into the light, not only with him but with God Himself in prayer, describing it specifically rather than hiding behind vague phrases. As I moved into my first year of college, the war with pornography intensified in some ways. Living in a dorm with high-speed internet and very little supervision was like throwing gasoline on a smoldering fire. There were relapses that left me in tears. There were nights I sat on my bed feeling like a fraud, wondering if the Holy Spirit could possibly still be residing in someone like me. But there were also new moments I had never experienced before: moments where I felt the tug of temptation and, instead of plunging in, I paused and cried out, “Jesus, help me.” Sometimes that prayer felt weak and clumsy. Sometimes I still gave in. But slowly, painfully, God began building something in me that I had never really had: a habit of turning to Him in the middle of the battle instead of only AFTER I lost. The real turning point came my sophomore year, when everything else in my life seemed to unravel all at once. My dad lost his job when the factory closed. My parents’ simmering tension boiled over into constant shouting matches. The girl I had been dating broke up with me in a text message that started with “We need to talk” and ended with “I just don’t see a future with you.” My grades slipped. My mental health wobbled. There was one night I sat in my car in the parking lot of a Walmart, gripping the steering wheel so hard my hands hurt, and I thought very clearly, “If this is what Christian life is, I don’t want it. If I’m going to be miserable either way, why not just stop pretending and live however I want?” I didn’t hear an audible voice from God that night, but I did remember the prodigal son. I remembered the father running. I remembered Steve saying, “God does not love a future, polished version of you; He loves you now.” And I realized that my picture of the Christian life had still been too much about my performance and not enough about God’s relentless, patient, stubborn grace. Sitting there in my car, I prayed something that changed me. I said, “Jesus, if I never get married, if my parents never change, if my triggers never disappear, if my temptations always feel strong, I still want You. I don’t want freedom from porn more than I want You — I want You more than I want freedom. Give me Yourself, whether or not You give me an easy life.” That prayer did not magically remove every temptation. But it realigned my heart. My goal stopped being, “I want to become the kind of person who doesn’t need grace anymore.” My goal became, “I want to walk with Jesus in truth, needing Him every single day.” Over the next several years, the addiction that once ruled me began to lose its grip. Not because I became a super-disciplined saint, but because Jesus started pulling my roots out of the soil of shame and re-planting them in His love. My patterns changed gradually. I installed filters on my devices, not because filters are magical, but because I wanted to cooperate with the Spirit’s work in me. I deleted certain apps entirely. I learned to text a friend instead of going down an old path when I felt lonely late at night. I joined a small men’s group at a nearby church where we talked honestly, confessed sin, and prayed for one another without pretending. Today, I am not a man who boasts about his strength. I am a man who boasts about the patience of Christ. I’ve been married for eight years now to a woman who knows my past and has walked with me through the long journey of building trust. We have two children, a mortgage, and all the ordinary chaos of life, and yet there is a deep, strange peace in our home that I never knew in my childhood. I still feel temptation at times. I still have days when shame whispers, “If they really knew you…” But those whispers no longer define me. What defines me now is this: I am a beloved son whose Father ran toward him while he still smelled like the pig pen. I am a man whose failures did not shock God, whose secrets were already known at the cross, whose weakness has become the place where Christ’s power is most clearly seen. I am not the hero of my story. I am the one who wandered and got rescued again and again by a Savior who simply refused to let me go. If you hear anything in my testimony, I hope you hear this: you do not have to fix yourself before you come home. The Father is not waiting at the top of the hill with crossed arms, checking to see if you’ve cleaned up enough to deserve a hug. He is already on the road, running toward you, robe in hand, ready to cover your shame with His grace. I spent years believing that God only helped good people. I now know there is no such category. There are only sinners who hide in the dark and sinners who step into the light. I was once the first. By the mercy of Christ, I am learning to live as the second. And if He can do that in someone as stubborn, fearful, and ashamed as me, He can do it for you too.