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I have been talking with many men that have come to our site and I have noticed commonalities between each person. 

1. Quite often it’s the result of being in a “crisis” situation.  My wife found out and now I’m in very hot water.  Typically us men don’t reach for help until we have made a mess of things and need some kind of compass to navigate our way out.  Leafoutreach has been developed to tell you that your navigational errors to this point have been the absence of your Lord and Master in your life.  I don’t want you to “mend a fence” with your wife.  The fence you have right now isn’t worth fixing.  A God purposed life will rebuild that broken down fence into one of character and integrity.  If you don’t follow God’s plan, then you might come up with the right words to do some modest healing, but you won’t escape the addiction.  Your wife is not that powerful of love in your life to change, as horrible as that sounds.  Dr. Emerson Eggerich who leads Love and Respect conferences around the country has said “Men are willing to take a bullet for their wives” which is so true.  However those same men can’t find enough man in them to quit their pornography addiction.

2. Each man I talk to says that they have an emptiness after viewing porn.  Sure there is that elusive excitement about what you might find on the next page or the next movie.  But when it’s all over, you feel empty and hollow.  But yet when I ask men if they feel the same way after physical intimacy with their wife they say they don’t experience that empty feeling at all.  Why do you suppose this is?  What is your heart trying to tell you?

3. “I don’t think I’m hurting anybody” or “Every man does it” or “Who cares I’m not touching anybody”.  Let’s use that theory for a moment and not even get into God’s feeling about it.  Just on the human practical level let’s say your son who is 15 puts hours every day into clicking on Muslim terrorist sites.  He has yet to build a bomb or hurt anybody.  Are you ok with that?  Now don’t use man reasoning here “looking at a naked woman is different than following the Taliban” is probably what you are saying.  Oh really?  If your marriage breaks apart because of this and your family disconnected with their father you don’t think that brings terror in a family? Did you come to this website just for some information or did you come here for real healing?

4. Realization that there is something better for their lives.  This is the best commonality about the men that talk with us.  The realization that they have been missing a connection with God, that Christ the Savior can take ever single act of viewing and downloading porn right off the books.  That the pull and draw of the addiction can be broken by being connected to God through prayer.  That the joy that men want in their lives can be real and within reach.  This doesn’t happen 100% of the time because some men are unwilling to put their faith in what appears to be invisible.  But let me tell you my life, and the lives of many others have been changed because it’s not invisible, but real. 

Today, if you don’t do anything.  Just say a prayer and ask God to come into your heart and make you a complete man.  There is a better life than you have right now, but it’s not going to be that way simply under your own navigation.

    Today our marriages are deeply rooted in trouble from the moment “I do” is said.  When we get married to our spouse we enter a covenant with God and each other with our hearts, as well as our whole body to become one with each other.  Somehow we go into marriage (yes in love) and with the best intentions but really don’t grasp what the Bible is saying to us about our obligations to each other and most importantly God.  For example, you would not take out a $20,000 loan from the bank without reading the fine print to see the terms of loan, the interest rate and the monthly payment amount.   Our responsibility is to immerse ourselves into God’s word to help guide us through life.   We can use this to find relationships God would want us to have or to work through our marriage difficulties by praying, obeying God’s word and forgiving each other.  Yes, we sometimes don’t really find God until after marriage or give him the reigns to our life early enough; so we end up making bad choices.    All of us are born with the good seed God has given us but as the years go by and this world gets a hold of us and we shape ourselves accordingly to our selfish desires. 

     As babies we gradually get influenced by our pathologies carried down from generations before us and continue to carry it into adulthood, then joining our lives with another.  Making Godly choices and relying on the Bible daily we can become who God wants us to be.  No, we’re not perfect and we are still broken people but we can turn our marriages around by setting examples by our actions to each other, praying for your spouse and being the more mature one to be forgiving of their inequities.  I’m not saying to stay with someone if they are abusive physically or committing crimes of any kind.   I am saying there isn’t any perfect relationship and that most of us will keep looking for it through each and every marriage or relationship.  

     Our eyes and ears have become the target of the devil’s plan to lure us away from our spouses in a form of lust for each other.  Temptations are around all of us in many different forms in today’s world; it can start as a child by simply getting an e-mail in a form of spam or by innocently looking up a word in a search engine.  What starts as curiosity develops throughout our life and then progresses into our marriages.   Most men believe that it is alright to look but not to touch because after all they still love their wife!   Women are eager to be noticed and loved based on this desire that men have.  Further more women on the other hand generally are attracted by a personality or a voice which make them easy targets for companionship in chat rooms on the internet.  We are in this vicious cycle of looking and pleasing the opposite sex, which is the greatest deception in our marriages today.   What we think is an added bonus is really a hidden subtraction that distances us from our spouses today.  I know that it is impossible not to notice our surroundings around us but we have a choice whether to participate and linger our lustful thoughts towards what we see or hear.    If we focus our thoughts and eye sight on our spouses only, then a beautiful deep connection happens the way it was intended to be.  

     Today the world has taken on a new frontier of sexual immorality in many different forms through the explosion of the internet, cell phones, and subscription channels on cable and satellite services.   Our world has accepted what God has not.  Do we continue to live of this world (with our selfish desires) or grasp on to the direction God wants us to go?  Our choices affect our marriages, our children and their lives as well.   The most important element is like my son said at age eleven (5yrs ago) “pick the right path before you live it.”

Jacque Merkel

Leafoutreach.org

We encourage you to send us your comments as well as the story of your struggles or successes in your life.  With your permission we might use it for an upcoming newsletter (of course without disclosing names).  Send to either Jacque@leafoutreach.org

It may be next to impossible but Apple is trying to deny developers from making applications that are pornagraphic. Just recently Apple banned an iPhone application for reportedly featuring explicit pictures of a 15-year-old girl.

The "BeautyMeter" enables iPhone and iPod Touch owners to view user-submitted photos and rate them based on various body parts and clothing. The program shows pictures of women and men in various states of undress. Before it was pulled from the App Store last Thursday, it featured a picture of a topless 15-year-old female.

Just over a week ago, Wired.com reported on an application called "Hottest Girls", which released an update to include topless photos of women. Apple pulled it hours later, saying porn is not allowed.

"Apple will not distribute applications that contain inappropriate content, such as pornography. The developer of this application added inappropriate content directly from their server after the application had been approved and distributed and after the developer had subsequently been asked to remove some offensive content. This was a direct violation of the terms of the iPhone Developer Program. The application is no longer available on the App Store," an Apple spokesman said regarding Hottest Girls on June 25.

Adult material infiltrates every technical modality of our life, and to rely on corporate America to police it for us we are missing the main point, and that is for our hearts to be guarded.

What is your most prized possession?   Is it an autographed baseball from a hero of the past?  Maybe it’s an heirloom from your father and mother.  An antique you have had all your life?   Those are the kind of images that we immediately think of when we are asked about those things that we cherish the most.  Unfortunately we seldom think of our children’s and families hearts!  Amazingly as we exit our home, so many of us punch in the code that enables our security system so that thieves won’t have access to our “stuff”. Yet, we go thru our daily lives thinking that we all have this “internal” security system that stops the infiltration in our lives that rob us, such as the millions of websites that offer us fantasy but in reality offer separation and darkness. 

Enter, “the firewall”.

This small device installed right up front with your high speed internet has features (if purchased) that will deny the ability of every single member of your family (including yourself) of the opportunity to graze websites that you deem destructive to the heart.  Unlike software that protects only a single device, the firewall with the optional “plug in” will eliminate the opportunity to view websites that you deem destructive in your entire house.  You can pick and choose those items you wish to eliminate.  Maybe it’s just pornography sites.  Perhaps it’s that along with intimate apparel sites.  Maybe it’s gambling, hate speech sites, etc.  You choose the level of protection in your home, and every computer is covered.  The best part is it is constantly updated in real time daily.  As the list of detrimental sites grows, so does the “denial” list.

It is yet one more item in your tool belt that can protect the most valuable thing in your life.  Your family!

There is one more important aspect of the firewall that will seal the deal.  It also prevents PS3 consoles and PSP handheld devices from accessing those same websites.  What good is it if you buy something for your kid’s desktop computer, but they wind up surfing the internet on their game system?  (A lot of people don’t know they have that capability.) 

It’s been said that a person is only 3 clicks away from becoming an addict.  If we safeguard our family from these sites, 1 click will be impossibility.

Man of the Flesh to Man of the Cloth Story by SHARON WAXMAN

SOME people have their midlife crisis in reverse, like Ronald Boyer, who for most of his professional life has been better known as a star of pornographic films, Rod Fontana.

After 30 years of sowing the wildest of oats, Mr. Boyer, 54, has searched his soul and chosen, to the surprise of family and colleagues, to seek a priesthood in the Episcopal Church.

More children and teens are being exposed to online pornography, mostly by accidentally viewing sexually explicit web sites while surfing the internet.  This is a story that has been revealed by CBS News.  (see full story by clicking the link below) 42% of internet users aged 10 to 17 surveyed said they had seen online pornography in a recent 12 month span.  Of those 66% said they did not want to view the images and had not sought them out.  We at Leafoutreach believe that if you were a parent of a child and they came in contact with a drug pusher, would you intervene?  If you as a parent knew that could come in contact with a sexual predator, would you try to intervene?  So, in light of the constant bombardment of soft and hard core pornography over the internet, why don’t more parents intervene and do what they can to stop this kind of perversion?  Please search for on-line filters that weed out pornography and centrally locate the computer that your child has access to.

CLICK HERE for News Story and Video from CBS.

If you have not yet seen the movie Fireproof, it is a must see for anyone wishing to enhance their marriage to those that are facing challenging storms.  It’s a story about a heroic fireman locked in a failing marriage that accepts his father's challenge to take part in a 40-day experiment designed to teach both husband and wife the true meaning of commitment and love in a faith-based marriage. To no surprise one of the reasons behind the division between the couple was his involvement with internet pornography.  This addiction takes it toll on a very high percentage of married couples and leads to disaster.  After you watch it, you will be inspired to buy the book “The Love Dare” currently available at most book stores. Each day of the book outlines a dare that you must follow.  If you follow the book as it is written, you will find yourself becoming less consumed with who you were, and becoming of the Christian God intended you to be.  Look for the DVD of Fireproof to be release sometime in January.  Here is a link to the official website and trailer.

http://www.fireproofthemovie.com

With the hundreds of thousands of web sites dedicated to the pornography industry already, the big players behind the industry want you to have access to it regardless of where you are.  Enter the iPhone.  Apples newest and heavily sought after phone can access pornography from the big players.  Vivid entertainment now says that 50% of it’s mobile browser traffic comes from iPhones.  They have also created a “supersite” to capitalize on the iPhone, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the project.  Penthouse is investing tens of millions in digital research and development, with the iPhone being a beautiful medium according to Marc Bell CEO of Penthouse.  Digital Playground and Pink Visual, also huge pornography companies are doing the same.  Cellular phones are woven into the fabric of our lives, and the lure of pornography is now available anywhere.  One unnamed source of ours that works for Kindercare say’s that he has seen a child as young as 4 years old with an iPhone.   While youth is not specifically targeted it is well known that if they can “get them young” they will be addicted all their life.

Source: Time Magazine

At a Senate hearing a few years back, medical experts testified about some new technology that allows doctors to look inside addicts' brains to determine just how damaging pornography is. The witnesses described research showing the similarity of porn addiction to cocaine addiction. Further, because images are stored in the brain and can be recalled at any moment, these experts believe that a porn addiction may be harder to break than a heroin addiction.

Somehow the pornography industry has convinced a large segment of the population that viewing porn is not just harmless fun, but is also a fundamental right.

By not calling pornography what it is - highly addictive and destructive material - we are heading for troubled times. Dr. Patrick Carnes, a leading researcher on sex addiction, estimates that 3 to 6 percent of Americans are sexually addicted. That’s as many as 20 million people. (That was 6 years ago, imagine what it is today)

This epidemic isn’t confined to individuals, however. Pornography is one of the leading causes of family breakdown today.

Remember when you were a child and found out that life had an ending? You discovered that someone you loved would no longer be a part of your life anymore. You didn’t understand why it happened, and the rawness that ensued when you were separated forevermore from that person?