AMAZING STORY
When God Washes Away a Man's Lust
By Dory Nissen
The 700 Club
CBN.com“There were times where I heard them. I was confused, very confused. There was even a time or two I was in the same room. “
The sounds matt Kowalski remembers most as a boy came from his mother’s bedroom when her various boyfriends slept over. On a visit to his dad’s he learned what those sounds were when he found porn magazines, and videos. Secretly watching the videos became a highlight of his visits.
“I felt a sense curiosity. A sense of excitement. To me it was normal. That was all I had witnessed. That was all I was around. I didn’t know anything different. That was what was modeled for me.”
After he graduated high school, matt took a job in Las Vegas. His boyhood fascination with porn turned into an obsession with sex. He discovered nude clubs. Now sex was always on his mind.
“Definitely in my head and thoughts, you know, it was something I can go right to when I bored, stressed, whatever it is. Just want to escape for a second.”
When he wasn’t on the Vegas strip, he was on the Internet. His addiction grew stronger until he was watching porn several times a day. Even on his phone.
“Now I have internet access in my pocket everywhere I go. Anywhere.”
Then he met Amy and it wasn’t long before she became Mrs. Kowalski. But matt had no intention of stopping his secret habit.
“I didn’t think anything was wrong with the fact that I looked at pornography while in a committed relationship. I justified in my mind I wasn’t cheating, it was okay. Because it was not real women. It was images. It was fantasy, ultimately.”
Soon they started a family. Amy never suspected matt’s obsession with porn. She thought everything was fine. Until she discovered the sites on the family computer.
Amy says, “I felt shocked. I didn’t think that was something that he would do. It felt like this secret, like I didn’t know him. I was just instantly felt sick to my stomach.”
Matt promised Amy he wouldn’t do it again. But it was an empty promise because by now matt had no control over his addiction.
“I need more. My threshold grows and I need to seek out different images, different pornography. Different things.”
As their family grew Amy believed matt had put the porn behind him, she was wrong. Instead matt stepped deeper into his obsession. Images were no longer enough. When he found a website for a Vegas call girl service matt made an appointment and followed through.
“I felt ashamed. I just felt like in this darkness, alone, dirty. Um, pathetic, guilty. I knew if I would confess, that that could be the end of our family, our marriage.”
But Amy discovered matt’s ugly secret. She borrowed his cell phone, the prostitute website popped up in his browser.
Amy remembers, “He tried to get the phone back from me so he could delete what was on it before I saw more.”
Matt told Amy the truth.
Amy sadly recalls, “It was nothing that was never on my radar, anything that I would ever expect. I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I didn’t know what to think. It was like everything had just crumbled completely apart in front of my face at that moment.”
Amy told matt she was leaving. He begged her to stay and promised to get help. Reluctantly, she agreed. He went into a counseling program based on Christian principles. He wasn’t interested in learning about god, he just wanted help.
“We did a lot of work with getting down to family or origin and the family dynamics that really was driving behaviors in my life that I was running from, suppressing, ignoring. And through that process, god began working on me”
Matt realized the only way to be healed from his addiction, was to surrender his life to Christ.
“When I asked Christ into my heart, into my life and to lead me and to heal me and direct my life and to show me him, I felt lighter. I felt like I wasn’t as heavy, like a weight was lifted off my shoulders. Like there was hope”
God was working in Amy’s heart too while attending family sessions offered by matt’s program.
“I saw the people that I wanted to have the life like they did, and I wanted to have the marriages that they did and the families that they did. I saw that god was the common denominator in everything that they had. I saw this peace that I had never seen before and happiness and joy.”
Amy accepted Jesus Christ as her savior.
“I started to feel like there was that light that I –I would be okay, that regardless of what happened, and I began to find who I was in him. Because I had questioned myself so much as to why my husband didn’t want me. But I was perfect in who god said I was and who he created me to be.”
Matt asked Amy for forgiveness, and now real healing could begin.
Amy says, “I had hope for our marriage. He was becoming a different man. It was better than when we first got married. The honeymoon stage came much later for us, it came after we accepted Christ. And we began to have intimacy that I never knew possible.”
Today matt and Amy have a marriage based on the foundation of Jesus Christ.
Matt: with Christ our marriage has stability.
Amy: with Christ our marriage is restored.
Matt: our marriage is strengthened.
Amy: our marriage is joyful.
Matt: with Christ our marriage has forgiveness, grace, and a future.
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