The father had offered his mentally retarded daughter for sex

Let me tell you briefly about my past history and who I am. I am the youngest of three children, who were PK’s (preacher’s kids). I grew up knowing God and the difference between right from wrong. During my high school years I stayed out of trouble for the most part, but dabbled in a few things I shouldn’t have with a very close friend of mine. However, after high school I cleaned up my act and went to school to be a minister. I got married at a young age and was way too young to be a husband. I was very self indulged. After only seven years of marriage my wife left me. This was devastating. Everything I had ever worked for was about to be taken from me. To be a minister in the Baptist denomination you cannot be divorced.

However, God had a better plan. After a period of grieving for the loss of that marriage God called me to a church in Indiana to be youth minister and song director.That was when I met my second wife; it was love at first sight. We had known each other for years but had lost contact with one another. We married after only two months of dating, and a year and a half later we had a beautiful baby girl. She was the pride of our lives. My life was good, good things were happening and we were very much in love.

It was sometime after we bought our house that things started weighing on our marriage and became very stressful for us. We did not have the finances we really needed for the bills we had accumulated. It wasn’t too long until I got a part time job and then ended up leaving the church job that I had been working at for five years. I started working full time in the secular field with mentally ill adults. Because of this decision my wife had to go back to work and I believe that caused some resentment towards me from her (that is only my opinion). I now know I should had done many things differently.

That last year I started feeling sorry for myself over some things that are now insignificant, but at the time were discouraging to me. I felt like my wife was rejecting me, our lines of communication kept falling down to where we didn’t speak much to each other.
It would be easy for me to blame all of this on my wife, that’s what most of us do, we blame our own weaknesses and fears of self worth on others and mainly the people we love most when truly only we can control how we feel about ourselves.

I forget exactly how everything began, but I feel that it started one lonely night while my wife was asleep in bed. I got on the internet out of boredom and started surfing the net hoping to spend a short time browsing before becoming sleepy. I had no intentions of looking for sites I as a Christian should not be looking at. If you know anything about the internet it does not take a lot of work for inappropriate web sites to appear. Next thing I knew, I had spent three hours or more surfing through pornographic web sites. I was hooked. Night after night I would spend hours browsing these sights. If I had free time during the day, my computer was up and running searching for more and more porn. I never knew you could find this much free porn on the internet, but the fact is it is full of free websites waiting to take you in.

Then I discovered the world of Chat. This became more addicting to me, because now pornography was only a chat member away. I had several people sending me pornography of all sorts, things I had never seen before, things I am now ashamed to say I have even seen. The fact about pornography is that it gradually worsens, it sucks you in.

I remember the saying growing up that says, sin will take you further than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay and cost you more than you want to pay. How true that had become in my life. You see, one of the men I was chatting with was a pedophile. I didn’t know this. He who took a plane ride to Florida where he was to hook up with a father of a mentally retarded girl. The father had offered his daughter to the man for sex. Little did he know that the father was an undercover policeman who arrested him on the spot. This man was desperate because he was now looking at jail time. So, in order to try and get himself out of trouble he gave names of other people they should investigate and I was one of those people. He had lied and told them I had offered my daughter to him for sex and that in the near future we were going to make arrangements to meet.

That’s where the vice cops and FBI agents come into play. I had worked a late night at my job and had just laid down when I got a knock at the door. It was the police. They came in to interview me and set up a tape recorder. My heart was pounding and my chest was tight. What did they want with me? They began to unravel the events that had led them to me and the reason we were meeting. Come to find out this man lived just down the road from us and knew where we lived, not to mention he knew all our names. I had never been so frightened in all my days. I explained to them that none of what he suggested was true and gave them permission to diagnosis my computer to look for child pornography.

The police had every intension of arresting me that day, believing what this man had said was true. The FBI agent installed a program on my computer that would search for all images on my computer. To make a long story short, there was no child pornography on my computer. We chatted a little more about this man, they advised me they had not said anything to my wife and as far as they could see there would be no more need to look into this matter.

This is where I made the worst decision of my life. I should have gone to my wife and confessed all that had happened and all the things that I was into online, but I didn’t. I had never had so much fear in my life and for a week I could not sleep. I kept looking out the windows, all along wanting so much to tell my wife what had happen. However, the police advised me that there was no need to bring her into this and that I should seek some help for the pornography. The truth was, they had already gone to my wife before ever meeting with me and because of the deceitfulness of my action she became scared and didn’t know what she should do. Her first thought was to protect our daughter. I imagine she had no other choice but to believe this could be true. I was acting strangely and didn’t tell her anything about what had happened. That week she filed for divorce unbeknown to me. The following week the police returned to my home with search warrants on my house and place of employment.

I remember sitting on the front lawn as the neighbors watched them take my computer and computer equipment, police cars all over. It looked like a scene from a movie. Next they told me they were on their way to my office and were going to do a search there. My heart dropped and as they left my house and went to my office I barely remember the steps I took. I remember grabbing a bottle of pills and calling my Pastor. He took me to see a lawyer who tried to calm me down and could see my plan for suicide. I ended up at the hospital and all I could say was “I want to die” over and over again. Suicide was now the one constant thing on my mind, my life was now over. Even though I knew I was not involved in offering my daughter for sex the police were letting everyone think that and on top of that I had so much guilt for the other things I had been involved in, all I wanted to do was die. Pornography led me to many risky things; although not illegal they were very immoral. How was I going to face anyone ever again? How was I going to face my wife?

The truth is I fell into sin and I got in way over my head. I betrayed my wife, my boss, my friends, my family members and I especially betrayed God. I remember during times of my sins, pushing God out. I would feel His power of conviction fall over me and I would tell Him no! I was going to do what I wanted. That is one of the hardest things I am dealing with today. You see, the nature of my sin is really unimportant at this moment, in God’s eyes sin is sin. It is the selfishness I had of only caring for myself that is tragic. I never thought I would so purposely push God away and tell Him to leave me alone so I could indulge in my sin.

You see, I have only shared with you the sins I have chosen to share with you. Yet, with God there is no sin I can hide from him, He knows all that I have done, where I have been. Now, I have had to come to terms with an addiction to pornography and sex realizing that I am powerless over it. I need Christ to be strong in my life if I am to overcome this. I in no way feel I deserve forgiveness. In fact, it is very hard to accept.