Official Blog For Author Fred Stoeker

    I’ve not been able to put down Every Young Man’s Battle. I have even been yelled at for reading it when I was supposed to be going to sleep! How ironic!  But the Lord is getting a hold of me with His loving but ever-present hand.  Already, I can actually sit down and read and pray without feeling like a hypocrite!  I can finally say, “I am free from the bondage of sin” and not be lying!  Praise God!
    I can’t wait until I begin reading the follow-up books, Tactics and Hero!  I can only imagine how much more the Lord will change me through these great resources. I pray that I can use these books around my school to further the gospel.  The book has changed me and made me go from hypocrite to genuine Christian, and it’s only been three days!  I know I can use these books to reach the lost.
    Thank you for actually putting your reputation on the line to write these books for people like me.  I know the God has used you in more than just my life, and I am sure that He will greatly reward you for simply obeying Him and spreading His sin-freeing power! I am forever grateful!

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       I just wanted to drop you a line and let you know that your book “Tactics” has been a tremendous blessing and instrument for change in my life even though it was written for young men. I am a single woman in my early 30’s and have been struggling with sexual sin since my pre-teen years. It has grieved me that I couldn’t seem to “get rid of” this particular set of sins in my life. Although there are several books written toward women’s struggle with sexual sin, they haven’t generally hit on my particular weak areas and often focus more on fighting the sin than drawing close to our Lover in Heaven. 
      The truths in “Tactics” have helped me to submit more immediately to God’s authority when tempted, and it has also driven home the point that drawing near to God, and letting Him fill me with His love, is really where I am going to find freedom. The more I draw close to Him, the less I am interested in entertaining temptation. This truth is one that God continues to teach me and grow in me.  Thank you again and keep fighting the good fight!

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      I’ve been reading “Every Man’s Battle” for a few weeks now.  I’m just starting chapter 15.  I’ve been practicing bouncing my eyes and taking every thought captive.  Today, JUST NOW, not 5 minutes ago, I had a MAJOR victory!  My wife is out with some girlfriends from church going to see a movie.  My 7 year old son and I are pretty big fans of the new Chevy Camaro (the one that is the “Bumblebee” transformer in the movie).  Anyway, I was looking for a new desktop wallpaper on the Google Images search.  I now have the safety features of that search function turned on, and in all ABSOLUTE HONESTY stumbling across something pornographic was the FURTHEST thing from my mind.  Still, sure enough, up pops one of those pictures of the Camaro with a mostly-naked girl standing next to it.
      But what did I do, Fred?  I slammed my eyes shut.  I saw it.  But I did not LOOK at it.  Not for more than a split half second.  Long enough for my brain to realize what the image was and then, boom, closed went the eyes.  I’m sitting there, alone, at the computer with my eyes closed knowing if I open them that image would still be there.  I’m a computer geek.  I know 3 different ways to close that window and 5 different ways to turn off the computer without looking at the screen.  Then I hear my iTunes playlist switch to a song I haven’t heard in a very long time.  Michael W. Smith’s “Little Stronger Everyday”. One of the first lines in that song is “A little carnal knowledge is a dangerous thing and it’ll leave a hole in the brain”.  I exercised one of those keystrokes to close that window with my eyes closed.  VICTORY!!!  I could literally feel the presence of the Holy Spirit, smiling, as if to say ‘See, you can train your eyes to react differently and your will power can be strengthened in Me’.  Praise God.   
      Thanks Fred for your books. My wife is also reading “Every Heart Restored”.  They are changing our lives every day. We discuss them, we’re open, honest with each other about things I never thought I’d be able to share with her. This battle is bringing us closer together.

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I emailed you a few months ago and told you my story and asked you what books you recommend for me, and I want to thank you for responding. I just finished your trilogy tonight (Every Young Man’s Battle, Tactics, and Hero) and I have been challenged in ways I have never dreamed possible.  I’m still single, but God has laid it on my heart to prepare for marriage by fighting for my purity, by reading Christian books on marriage and by asking my pastor for advice about marriage even before God allows me to meet my wife. The most important thing I’ve learned besides how to fight for my purity is that I need to encourage my brothers and my sister’s in Christ to join me in the fight. God has laid it on my heart to buy your trilogy for the other guys in my youth group. I already bought one set for one of the guys and I’ve let my youth pastor borrow my set. I’m so excited to see what God as for me in the next few weeks and months with in this battle. I also want to congratulate you on being a strong influence upon your son and family, and tell Jasen and Rose that I said congrats on their marriage and winning their fight. Thank you again for writing these books. May God bless you!

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My husband and I are both ordained in our denomination. We married just after he graduated from seminary and right just before I began my first year of seminary. During our first year of marriage, we spent one semester in separate cities a good distance apart, so we only saw each other every four weeks. In the between times, we relied sexually on lots of phone calls and a few revealing pictures of each other.
 
Here’s where my thinking was at that time: Since we were married and living apart, I thought giving naked pictures of ourselves to each other were okay. I also thought that battery-operated vibrators and other sex toys were okay to use in the meantime, especially when we used them over the phone while talking to each other.
 
After that first semester, my husband resigned from his call at his first church and he moved to my city for my seminary years. During that time, we gave birth to our firstborn, and though we had agreed long ago that porn had to go completely from our lives, now it seemed even more important. I thought it WAS completely gone from out lives. One evening while my husband was at work, however, I stumbled across our browsing history and found we had been getting huge amounts of x-rated emails “for no good reason.”  Well, I found out there had been a reason…my husband’s porn habit.  
 
I called my husband at work and told him to come home immediately. While he was on his way home, I packed his bags. When he came inside the front door, I took his wallet and keys, and gave him his car key, his driver’s license, $50 and his suitcases. I told him we had some work to do and that I would talk to him the next day, and then sent him back out to his car. I also called his mom in Texas and gave her a heads up so that she could help by praying for us both.
 
I allowed him to move home the next day, but I insisted he stay in the guest room for six months. We began counseling, and he joined a SA group. We bought your book Every Man’s Battle, as well.
 
I couldn’t understand all this, because I still thought that his sexual sin was about me, a reflection on me as his lover. That’s why it didn’t make any sense. I’m one of those women who loves to have sex with her husband. I love it, lots of it. I love creative stuff, too, so I couldn’t imagine why he was going elsewhere. It just blew me away.
 
It wasn’t until I’d gone through similar “discoveries” like this three more times over our twelve years of marriage that I finally got it. It isn’t about me. But do you know what else I’ve learned over this time? I always thought that those sex toys and vibrators were helping our sex lives together, but I’ve found that they can be just as damaging in a marital sexual relationship as the porn.

It is obvious why the porn is hard on a sexual relationship. I can NEVER live up to the images he sees online, because I’m real. There is no airbrushing, and I’ve had three kids.

But just like I can’t live up to the porn images, he can’t live up to what those batteries and vibrators can do to my senses. The more I used them, the less sensitive my body was to him. I became dependent upon that extra-impressive stimulation. Worse, the vibrators were available when he wasn’t. He didn’t mind that I used them on my own at first, since my sex drive is a good degree higher than his is and he saw the toys as something to bridge that gap for us. Not anymore. 

We have now banned the battery toys and vibrators from our bedroom. In fact, we’ve banned any form of self-stimulation from our home. I am happy to say it is a battle I am winning and that my body has returned to normal. Now that I’m allowing him to be my sole source of stimulation, I respond to him better than I ever did before.
 
While we are still battling the hold porn has over my husband, we are standing together with each other and with God. Some days I wonder how long it will be until we are totally free. That may sound discouraging, but I don’t see it that way. We are advancing together, and it is at least a big difference from wondering IF we will ever be free, like it was before.
 
Thank you so much for your work. I just wanted to help your work by sharing my own struggles with self-stimulation, a struggle that exacerbated our problems. There are many wives just like myself with high sex drives. We feel the same shame of rejection that you say husbands feel when a wife tells him “no” for no good reason. We, too, often look for substitutes. The problem is, our substitutes are just as destructive to the marriage bed as our husband’s substitutes. 
 
I continually praise God for revealing that to me. Can you help me share this revelation with your readers?

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I am currently in Iraq on a year deployment as an Army Captain and am going home any day now.  I read three of the Every Man’s series which really opened my eyes…Every Man’s Battle, Every Man’s Marriage and Every Man’s Challenge.  I have been married for nine years and thought I was a dedicated husband but now realized I did not do anything to bring oneness to the marriage.  My faith is the strongest it has been in my life and is going to continue to grow when I am home.  My major improvement was bouncing my eyes with women and cleaning out my mind.  I still have a few slip ups if a woman bend over in front of me, but I will keep striving for perfection.  I am very happy with my progress here though it was difficult sometimes due to being away from my wife for one year.  I am looking forward to reuniting and starting what I call a new, enriched relationship with her, and being the husband she deserves.  These books really put everything in perspective, and I want to thank you.

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Here is a testimony from across the ocean, from a little country called Holland. My name is Bret and I have some great things to tell you. As a 16-year-old guy I have struggled with masturbation for quite a while now. The first time it happened I felt quite bad about it and I knew it was bad, and the idea that God saw me do it made me feel guilty. By now, the problem has gone on for years, and more recently I began to fight the problem, because I know that God wants us to live holy lives. Trouble is I thought that I could probably live purely for a time, but deep down, I thought that I could never possibly do it without masturbation. So, in the past few years, sometimes I would do it a few times a day and sometimes not for months. The longest time I went without it was 14 weeks. I also found I had the wrong motive for purity. I know that freedom from sin is all grace, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist and somehow I wanted God to be proud of me and to stand as a good Christian in His eyes. That sounds very good in one sense, but it was a wrong motive for me because the only goal in purity for me was to be able to say to God, “Look how good I am that I haven’t done it for so long.” When I found out that my motives were wrong, I felt even more ashamed. But at least that knowledge allowed me to change course from trying to be “the perfect Christian” to living “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”

About that time, Every Young Man’s Battle was released in Dutch. When I read it, I was so blessed by it. I want to thank you so much for all the honestly and encouragement in the book, which I found really helpful. About halfway through, I came to the part about Job and it really blew my mind! I never really understood that not masturbating was normal and that you could simply live without it. From the day that I read the book two months ago, I haven’t slipped up, and I’m so thankful for that. But the best part came next.

As I was reading Every Young Man’s Battle, I sensed God saying to me, “I want you to buy the book for a few guys at school.” So I thought, “Okay that’s cool.” But then on the day when I finished reading it, I sensed God say, “Give it to Karl.” I had a test that day at school, so I thought, “Okay let’s do it,” but it felt a little bit weird. Nonetheless, I gave it to him, and he really appreciated the gesture, but that was it, or so I thought. He came up to me the next day at school and said, “Hey, I really have to tell you something! The day before you gave the book, I prayed to God and told Him that I really wanted to stop masturbating, but I asked Him if He would give me a sign that I should go ahead and fight it. The very next day, you gave me this book! How cool is that?”
I was blown away by that, and it is so amazing to see God working in our lives together in this battle. I also gave the book to some other very good friends who also struggle with the problem, and it was also a huge blessing for them. One of them is a volunteer for a Christian youth organization in Holland, and he recommended the book to them and they were excited about it. They want to use it as a tool for their organization in the future, so that’s even better!

There is even more. A few weeks ago, I got an email out of the blue from an old school mate whom I hadn’t seen for years, and he asked me if I could talk with him about God. So I went to see him, and it turned out that God was showing him that if he would continue to live that way he’d been living, that he would lose sight of God. So we talked about two hours and he dedicated his life to Jesus again, and he is now beginning reading the Bible again. Every week I go see him to encourage him and to talk about how it’s going with the Lord. Yesterday we talked together again, and he admitted that though he had a normal week with devotions and Bible reading, he didn’t feel the same intimacy with God that he’d been feeling before. So I asked him if there was anything in his life that could stand between him and God. The same week I had a lot of struggle with purity and felt the same distance he was talking about, so I told him about the masturbation thing, and he admitted that this was a problem for him. He thought God was not working with him anymore, but actually God had allowed my friend to feel that distance so that God could point his heart towards this issue of sexual sin and purity. I shared with him the things you shared in your book, and in the end he understood it all clearly, and he was thrilled that God was still working and that He had even used this bad thing to turn his heart back to good! So we had a great talk and at the end of the evening, I went home to get the book for him, and he is going to read it. I know it’s going to help him a lot, just like it did for me. It is so cool to see how God is working in his life like this.
These are just a few things that I wanted to share with you. I want to thank you so much for the book you guys wrote, and for all the encouragement and truth that is in it. It is extremely awesome the way God has used it in my life and the lives of my friends! Your own story was very heavy, but again, God has used that for good so that He can bless thousands of people around the world with your story and the insights God has given you about the subject of sexual purity.

God bless you!

Bret, The Netherlands.

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I have just finished reading your book Tactics, and I really feel a need to contact you and to express my thanks and gratitude to you. My name’s Jon, and I’m 26-years-old and living in Florida.

I happened upon the book at Christmas time when I was looking for something completely different, and I happened to lay my hands on a copy of Tactics. After reading the blurb about the book, I decided that I had to buy it and read further. I now believe that finding your book was the very reason that I was in the shop in the first place, and that it was God’s will that I be there.

I have had some issues with porn in the past, but my major problem was masturbation. Prior to finding your book, I believe that God had told me to cut it out of my life, and I have managed that for prolonged periods over the past two years, the longest being six months. However, there always seemed to be a reason to lapse and I found it easy to do so, since I didn’t have any real accountability.

Tactics has really helped me to understand the battlefield surrounding purity much better, and I now feel much more equipped to win this battle.

My largest issue in the purity battlefield, however, has always been my sexual orientation, and it was this aspect of my personal battle that encouraged me to read your book the most. During my teenage years, I came to the conclusion that I was gay, and this obviously was difficult to reconcile with my faith and eventually led to me to fall away from church. A few years later I was invited to church by a friend and jumped at the chance to rediscover some aspects of my faith.

From this point, a long journey with God followed, and it was on this journey that I finally stopped being stubborn and started to listen to Him about His feelings on homosexuality. Only a couple of months before finding Tactics, I made the decision to follow God fully and ask him to heal my broken sexuality. Although I realize that your writing is mainly aimed at heterosexual men, the revelations within your book about intimacy, the acceptance of men and our identity in God all rang very true with me, and I really believe that God spoke very clearly to me about some of the wounds in my past that caused me to become gay. (In fact I believe that my broken sexuality has the same root cause as heterosexual men, but it has simply been manifested in a different way.)

I am obviously still very much in the battle to resolve this and your book is only the beginning, but it has really given me a solid foundation for my healing and journey with God in this area. I found your writing packed with the wisdom of God, revelation and common sense. It has been the most enlightening read in relation to my sexuality and my sexual behavior and has really allowed me to have an insight into God’s will at an even greater level. So much literature relating to faith and sexuality (especially homosexuality) is unsecure and I am so pleased to have found some words of knowledge which ring so true with the voice of God.

I guess I just wanted to say thanks, not only for your writing, but also for taking a stand in the battle in the first place. Without your work and testimony it would be so much more difficult for me and a lot of other guys. Your writing is truly inspirational.

I continue to work with God on my healing and pray continually for a wife in the future. Thanks to Tactics, I’m a lot more confident that this is possible.

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Recently, my twenty-five-year-old son Jasen and I collaborated on our new book, Hero, which releases on April 14, 2009. In this book, Jasen reveals the mindset and disciplines he used to remain sexually pure all the way to the wedding altar, even while dating and even while being educated in the public school system.

He made this comment near the end of the book:

I admit that I used to think testimonies were just good filler material to add a little interest and to round out a message, like shaking salt and pepper on a plate of baked chicken and dumplings. Not anymore. These days I believe a good testimony is just as important as the teaching because of what this sharing does for your faith. Testimonies are the chicken and dumplings, as well as a powerful thing, as Scripture reminds us:

Worship God! For the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

Revelation 19:10b, NIV

The original language for the word testimony can be translated “to do again,” and that’s where its power lies. The moment you read or hear a testimony, the Holy Spirit shifts the spiritual atmosphere. Faith explodes in your heart, and hope swirls throughout your soul: If God can do this in that guy’s life, then God can do it again in mine. The power of the testimony lies in that stirring of faith, and the Holy Spirit only needs a little faith to duplicate that testimony in you and work victory throughout your life.

Hero, Chapter 15

I agree with my son, and that’s why I’ll be using my blog to share testimonies from time to time to help encourage you as you engage every man’s battle. Testimonies reveal that anything is possible with God. That goes double for the one I’m about to share with you. While most of the testimonies I’ll share will be short and to the point, today I kick off my blog with a favorite reader testimony that’s rather lengthy.  Let the words of this testimony stir up your faith as it reveals just how wonderfully complete God’s restoration process can be.

Note from Fred: I first met Jon through his mother at my church in Des Moines a couple of years ago, when he told me an incredible story about the life journey he’s on with God. In very short time, he’s gone from being as unheroic toward women as he could possibly be to being one of their most heroic defenders. I asked Jon if we could share his story with my readers, and he quickly agreed. Without further ado, here is Jon’s story:

When I was seven years old, my family attended a church in Nashville, Tennessee, where my parents met a woman named Helene who was starting a modeling agency. She said her vision was to send out Christian models as missionaries around the world.

My brother Phillip was two years older than me, and we looked and acted so much alike that many thought we were twins. Helene was intrigued, and after befriending my mom, she asked if she’d ever thought of getting her boys into modeling.

At first, my parents thought it was some scam to cheat them out of some money, and Helene couldn’t convince them that she was genuinely looking for missionary material. A couple of months later, she approached Mom with a new offer. “Hey, what if I pay for everything?” Helen proposed. “Would you be willing to let your boys try out for me?”

By this time, Mom had checked her out and discovered Helene’s strong reputation, so she agreed to give it a go. Soon I was grinning out of Sears catalog inserts in the Sunday morning newspaper and working in a couple of national commercials for Toyota. What a racket! My brother and I were home-schooled at the time, but since most of the modeling kids had to be taken out of school, the photographer would shoot them first while Phillip and I did our homework for fifty bucks an hour! That was great money at any age, but best of all, we really enjoyed the work.

We moved to Minnesota’s Twin Cities when I was eleven, where I entered public school for the first time, but I continued to model from time to time throughout middle school and high school. Storm clouds were building, however. Because of the influence of my older brother, I started drinking and partying heavily with the wrong crowd in high school, and by my senior year, I was pretty much drinking every day.

Just after graduation, Helene asked me about my future. “Are you looking at college, or do you want to continue to work in the business?”

“I don’t know,” I responded. “I’ve always enjoyed theater and acting. Maybe I should pursue that.”

“But what about your modeling? You’re good, and I think you could do it fulltime.”

Helene suggested that I travel to a competitive competition—yes, they exist in modeling—that was coming up in Charleston, South Carolina. She said it would get me some time in front of some of the biggest agents in the industry. Helene offered to pay my way to Nashville, where I could stay at her house while I took some prep classes and trained for the competition.

One hundred modeling agents from all over the world served as judges in the two-part competition in Charleston. I competed in photography modeling and swim suit modeling along with a talent portion covering acting, music, and dance. At the end of the competition came the “call-backs.” They’ve seen your photos. They’ve seen you on the runway. Now they tell you whether you’ll make the cut in the cutthroat modeling world.

 I received a phenomenal seventeen call-backs and placed second overall out of fifteen hundred young people. I soon found myself in New York City, where I signed with the Donald Trump Model Agency and was put on the road.

This began an era on intense travel, and I didn’t stay put anywhere longer than two or three months. During this time my entire view of women, sex, and relationships morphed grotesquely, but you have to understand how I was living. When you’re doing a fashion show or a casting in the modeling industry, there’s barely enough time to change from outfit to outfit. You’re always rushing around, and since men and women use the same changing room, you’re surrounded by a lot of hot-looking topless and nude women. Besides that, sex sells, and the photo shoots typically involved some kind of physical touching, kissing, or fooling around, which created a lot of heightened sexual awareness in the workplace. All the nudity and sexualized situations kept my mind racing, long after the shooting ended.

Imagine. I jumped into situations where I’d be making out with this incredibly hot girl, rolling around with little clothes on while the cameras are clicking away, and then I’d head home and never see the girl again. Talk about slamming the door of physical intimacy right in my face! The trouble is I couldn’t slam the door on the thoughts that raged in my mind and heart deep into the night.

Sometimes the shoots resulted in one-night stands, and everyone understood there would be no commitment since we were here today and gone tomorrow. I had a really weird perception in my mind as to what a healthy relationship was supposed to be like. Honor and heroism toward women? You’ve got to be kidding. What did those things have to do with it?

I was nineteen and in the fast lane, and my racy lifestyle didn’t stop at women. When I was back in New York, I didn’t need an ID. When you’re involved in the international modeling scene, you can get into any club in New York and drink for free . . . it’s all about whom you know. All the photographers and designers and clients mixed and conducted business in these clubs, and if you didn’t drink or weren’t into some kind of drug, you were on the outs. As a kid who’d partied nearly every night his senior year in high school, I’d found nirvana.

Then I was asked to become a “promoter” in the Big Apple’s club scene. In Manhattan, promoters are part of a half-dozen member team whose job is to create a buzz about a club and fill it up with people that make it “a happening” for the hip “pretty people” in New York City.
Here’s how being a promoter worked: when a designer wanted to shoot a magazine spread, he sent out a casting call that apprised agencies about their need for models with a certain type of body or certain weight and height or certain hair and eye color—a certain look.

What I did as a promoter was hang out at casting calls with lovely models and tell them, “Hey, I can get you into this new club for free, and you won’t have to wait in line or pay for your drinks.” I was very outgoing, persuasive, and knew how to talk to people. I spent that entire summer living in these crazy clubs and getting to know all the door people, club owners, and drug dealers. All the girls had to have their cocaine or marijuana, and it was my job to make them happy.

Because there were a lot of attractive women around, there were a lot of guys that the dealers wanted to drug up. When I hooked up these guys up with the dealers and the hot models, the dealers gave me free drugs. It was a win-win for everyone, or so it seemed at the time. I was simply providing a useful networking service for a sweet profit.

But to God, I was no better than a pimp with a bevy of prostitutes, using the beauty and bodies of these women for my own selfish business purposes. Though I was homeschooled and trained early in the ways of God, I couldn’t see what I’d become.

Burning the Candle at Both Ends

I suppose that’s no surprise since I was never really sober while living this lifestyle. I loved cocaine, and I got it free. I was making a ton of money. I thought I was invincible, that I could take over New York and do whatever I wanted to do.

Until the night the muscle of one of the club owners accused me of stealing some money. The dude threatened to kill me. I believed him. The fast lane suddenly looked a lot faster and scarier, and I knew it was time to tap the brakes. I called my parents, who were now living in Des Moines, and told them I needed to get away from New York for awhile. They couldn’t wait to see me, so I flew home immediately, right before Thanksgiving. But God was planning more than a little tap on the brakes.

On the day before Thanksgiving, my brother’s girlfriend teased me, asking, “Jon, what it would take for you to stop smoking pot?”

 “I’ll stop smoking pot the day I smoke it and don’t get high.” That was a joke among druggies—another way of saying I’d never stop smoking pot. That night, my parents left for Minneapolis to spend Thanksgiving Day with some relatives, and that gave me a good opportunity to stay behind to chill and get high.

I kept late hours, so Thanksgiving Day dawned for me around noon. As usual, when I woke up, I lit up, but this time I received the shock of my life. I couldn’t get high that afternoon, no matter how much I smoked. Since that was medically, physically, and scientifically impossible, God finally had me cornered with nowhere to hide. I stopped smoking pot that day and began thinking about the trajectory of my life.

My mother had “conveniently” left some books out in my bedroom, including one called Every Man’s Battle. She had encouraged me to read it because she had read Every Man’s Battle and knew who Fred was since they attended the same church.

I picked up the book and was blown away, frozen by his words. Fred’s teaching was so transforming, so practical. I instantly knew it was all true, and even though I wasn’t following the Lord closely yet, I felt compelled to begin applying his principles immediately. That began a cascade of change in my heart toward God and His daughters that continues to this day.

Off to Italy

The following spring, my modeling agency in New York hooked me up with an Italian agency in Milan. Agencies “trade” models back and forth between markets, kind of like trading baseball cards, only with people. Living in Italy without an anchor, I started drinking again and doing a little hash, but there was no doubt God was on the move in me.

I found this great little church in Milan populated by amazing people from all over the States. They took me under their wings, and the Holy Spirit started to work on me. I couldn’t worship the Lord without weeping.

Against all odds, I kept applying all that I learned in Every Man’s Battle, even though I was still living in that heavy, sexualized modeling culture on the runways and studios of Milan. Here’s an example: There are a lot of billboard advertisements in Italy that are skin care advertisements or skin-firming creams with waist-up shots of topless girls. That’s normal for Italy. In the old days, I’d walk by and look at the billboard on my way to wherever I was going, and if I happened to walk back that way again, I’d usually turn around and look at the larger-than-life breasts again on my way home.

I can distinctly remember a turning point in which I walked by this massive billboard with a gorgeous, topless girl. I glanced up and bounced my eyes as I passed by. On my way back that afternoon, I felt a strong temptation to turn back and take a long look, but instead, I thought, Hey, I know it’s there, and I already know what she looks like. I don’t have to look twice. For me, that was huge.

Immediately after that, I had another turning point, this time while working. I was doing an outdoor shoot with this girl, and between shots we’d stand behind the truck to change clothes. At one point as we slipped into new outfits, I asked her about the situation.

“Are you okay with changing clothes out in the open with me?”

 “Well that is just the way modeling is,” she said, shrugging.

“But it is not supposed to be like this!” I sniffed. “Do you want me to ask if you can change somewhere else?”

“No, that’s alright. It doesn’t bother me.”

But it bothered me, and that’s why I made a point to have my back to her as she changed, to honor her. Before I would have checked her out in her underwear, but suddenly that wasn’t okay with me anymore. I knew the Holy Spirit was changing me from the inside out.

When it came to honoring women, I became more bold and more heroic. On another shoot, I was watching the photographer and client explain to the girl what they wanted her to do with me. While I wasn’t fluent in Italian, I usually could sketch out what they were saying. In this case, the client wanted us to be standing together, both topless, but to position me in an embrace so that her breasts would be exposed from the side. I’m fairly perceptive with people, and I could tell this girl wasn’t very comfortable with what the client wanted from her. I could also tell that she felt like she had to go along because that was the shoot they wanted, and they paid the bills.
When the photographer and client walked away for a moment, I said, “Are you comfortable with what they want us to do?”

“Not really,” she said, softening a little.

“I’m not comfortable with it, either,” I said in frustration.

She was shocked and stared blankly at me. She’d probably never heard that from a guy, and certainly not from a model.

“Look, I need the money like you do, but I don’t want to be involved in anything disrespectful to you, especially if you don’t want to do it. Do you want me to talk to him about it?”

Her face looked like her brain had just been snatched out of her head. Shaking her head, she replied nervously, “I’m not so sure.”

“Let me take care of it,” I offered.

In the end, they shot the photo from above with the photographer about twelve feet above us. I was lying directly below him on my back, and she was lying on her stomach on a bench next to me. She was still topless, but all you could see was her back while we held hands. She was grateful to me, and I was proud to stand up for her honor. For the first time in my life, I felt like a man on a crusade, with a purpose.

I was boldly taking on all challenges outside the studios during my free time, too. Being in the modeling industry, a lot of my friends were models, and so obviously they were in magazines a lot. I used to love to peruse the magazine stands and flip through pages looking for my friends. A lot of the ladies were in bikinis—or topless like my friend in that shoot I just described. So I began to intentionally avoid the magazine racks. Sometimes I’d even walk past them backwards. I didn’t care how ridiculous it looked—that’s how committed I was to keeping my eyes pure.
Changes in England

During that summer in Milan, a wonderful Christian model—the kind of “missionary” in the field that Helene always hoped I would be—told me of an annual Christian gathering called “40 Days” held at a Youth with a Mission (YWAM) base in Harpenden, England, just outside of London. She told me it was big forum where Christians got together and talked about furthering the kingdom of God, and that it would change my life if I would go. I was tied up in Milan, and my agency in Italy had already gotten an agency in Greece to book me a ticket to model in the Greek Islands for a couple of months, but I managed to catch the last two days in England before the conference ended.

Two conversations over those two days would change the course of my life. One was with the leader of 40 Days, Trey Sheppard, and another was with a South African named Peter Wilburg. I told each of them my story separately, and each told me the same thing:

You have some important life decisions to make. You are learning to effectively manage your sin, but you are still bouncing from location to location and slipping back into old cycles too often. You need to make some sobering decisions about making a break from modeling and putting yourself into an environment where you can break these cycles forever.

Sobering was far too mild a word. . . . Trey and Peter were telling me to drop my career! Still, somewhere deep inside, I knew that’s what I needed to do.

When I returned to Italy, my agency in Milan was on a month’s vacation. While taking time off, I got to thinking about what they’d told me in England. If I profess to be a believer in God and if I’m going to pursue Him completely, I ought to know His word. Out of nowhere, I decided to read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. I dove headlong into the Word and read the whole thing in eleven days. Each day, all I did was wake up, eat, and start reading until it was lights out.

God used those eleven days to show me just how right Trey and Peter had been about my life and my need to make a clean break. I’d been in the model industry since I was a child. I’d been trained to be a person who gets people to notice me. That had to die, but that wouldn’t go easily. That was who I was at my very core. I also had a warped view of relationships with women. I had no idea how to have a Christ-centered relationship with a woman with the Lord as my main focus.

I knew the Lord wanted to put me on a journey to find what it looks like to have a sister-in-Christ relationship with women and to untrain myself from that desire to have everyone in the room notice me. Change is the name of the Christian game, and I sure needed change.

I took the first step in that journey by making a conscious decision to cut out all the women from my past. That meant not talking to them anymore by phone or by e-mail and taking measures to avoid thinking about them. That was a hard transition, but since I made that decision, I have not touched or kissed any woman in a sensual way.

But I’d been so messed up that I knew that learning how to relate to a sister in Christ and how to keep myself from being the focus in public situations would take more than a simple decision. The Lord helped me realize that if I wanted to be transformed, I needed to be immersed in some kind of community where I would be challenged to grow by others also immersed in seeking God.

I heard of a global program called Transit, which had a nine-month discipleship course in Kansas City, Missouri. Each of their bases, called “boiler rooms,” are a community of people focused on of justice, mercy, training, discipleship, mission, prayer, and hospitality.

Was I ready to come home from Europe and find out what God wanted me to do with the rest of my life?

I was ready.

I called my parents and told them that I wanted to obey God and come back to the States. I believed that by obeying God, He would then find me a job and take care of me. My parents hadn’t heard me talk like this in a long time, and they were overjoyed to fly me back home.
I arrived on a Thursday, and the following Tuesday I spoke with Adam Cox, one of the Transit leaders. The next Monday I moved to Kansas City, where sixteen people from around the world ran the program. We met as a community from 8 a.m to 4 p.m., Tuesday through Friday for classes, and we typically read at least one book a week. Then we studied how we could apply the things we read into our own lives. Application is everything at Transit.

The first three months were spent learning how much God loves us. The second three months were spent learning how to practically love one another in light of God’s love for us, while the third trimester was spent learning how to love the world and spread the Gospel.

I can’t say enough about Transit. The program taught me how to read the Word and apply the knowledge, and the tight schedule gave me a rhythm and structure to my life. Just as I expected, the Lord found me a ministry and gave me a job upon graduation. Transit asked me to stick around and be the director of hospitality for 24/7 USA and to be the keeper of the boiler room. Through the community, I also soon landed a job as a regional sales rep for a clothing line out of Kansas City, right up my alley.

About six months into Transit, I was asked by one of the leaders if I would pray about going to Southeast Asia with a small team to rescue women from prostitution, sex-slavery, and human trafficking. I prayed but was unsure of what I should do. My friend Dan simply asked two questions. “Did God tell you no, don’t go? Is your heart broken over what’s happening there?”
I said, “Yes, absolutely.”

“Then that’s your answer. We’re going.”

Three women joined Dan and me on the rescue trip, and as our unit jetted toward Cambodia, I was overwhelmed again and again by this new trajectory of my life. Honor and heroism had once had no place in my life with girls, but God had so transformed my heart toward women that my heart burned at the plight of sex slaves and prostitutes. The natural heroism of my male heart once lay in ashes, strewn across the shoulders of the fast lane of life, but God’s soft, steady breezes had it soaring like a phoenix in my soul. On top of that, He now trusted me enough with women to place me in Special Ops and send me straight into the enemy’s camp to snatch his daughters out of slavery. What a day, and what a mission! I thought. God can do anything.

We hit the ground running, working first with Cambodian Hope Ministry. Their team consists of twenty-six fairly new believers, all playing a key role in keeping young people from crossing into Thailand to find work, where they’ll likely be enslaved in the sex industry.
They’d taken surveys all along the border to find out what trades young people would choose if given the opportunity, figuring that if they could teach them a trade, they could give them a way to earn a living outside prostitution. They found that most girls wanted to learn to sew and that most guys favored the mechanical trades. This ministry opened two centers to teach girls how to sew in a daily classroom setting. They also opened a center for guys, supplying everything from the motors to the tools along with a Christian mechanic hungry to share his knowledge—and his faith.

In the city where we stayed, they also had a restaurant run by the sweetest three girls you’ll ever meet. They also built The Hope Center, a place of rest and refuge for widows and children, fully equipped with a school and kitchen, all designed to keep the hopeless and hungry from wandering across the border, where they’d likely get kidnapped into the sex trades.

All six of the guys associated with this ministry had chosen to live on the streets, to better connect with the poor and hurting. They’d begun planting gardens in the nearby villages with the greatest need, and they sent a full-time Christian gardener into each village to live among them and tend the gardens. The gardener then taught the rest of the village people how to start and maintain their own gardens, and in some cases, they built wells and sent in Christian teachers to educate the children.

Even after all I’d learned at Transit, I was challenged by their ability to see a need, pray, and then obey. This Cambodia trip changed me forever. I saw a deeper level of poverty than I’d ever seen before, yet the smiles and hope covering every Christian face were so bright that it still brings me great joy to think about it.

After spending twelve days in Cambodia learning how to keep women out of the sex trade, we headed back to Bangkok, Thailand, to partner with Rehab Ministries to rescue some who’d been captured. Rehab is located in the center of one of the two red-light districts in Bangkok. Both their offices and beauty salon occupy an upper story of a building surrounded by bars filled nightly by 4,000 prostitutes.

Why a beauty salon? The salon receives anywhere from thirty to forty-five of these prostitutes daily because if they arrive at the bar without their hair and make-up done, they are fined severely. Some find their way to Rehab, and as they get their hair done, they hear the gospel for the first time.

All the women working there are Thai believers who befriend and love these prostitutes daily. Rehab also sends teams out into the bars and strip clubs to befriend and minister to the girls through friendship. Many of the girls working the bars are not owned by pimps, so they have the freedom to leave. Rehab offers them training in salon work and teaches them English. Others are owned, and they must be rescued and given new lives elsewhere.

Our three Transit girls formed a team with three of the women from Rehab ministries and headed into an open air market called the Night Bazaar, which takes place in the main red light district, a two-lane packed on both sides by strip clubs, each three to five stories high. Each club’s bar is at the street level, with the floors above split into rooms for sex. The windows of these clubs aren’t blacked out like they are in America, so you can look right in and see half-naked girls in bikinis pole dancing fifteen from you.

This busy street is also packed with booths and vendors, selling cheap knock-offs of everything from jeans to jewelry to watches. Unfortunately, the Night Bazaar is heavily promoted to tourists as a great marketplace, but they aren’t told it’s a red-light district. In my one week in Bangkok, I saw at least 500 unashamed forty-to-sixty-year-old Western men with twentysomething Thai women on their arms walking by me. Every restaurant is packed with these mixed couples. As a Christian guy, I spent the first few days fighting the most overwhelming rage and anger that I’ll likely ever experience. You just want to punch these guys. On countless occasions, I was on the verge of vomiting from the disgust that rose up deep inside me.

I saw teenage brothers making excuses to break away from their parents to “shop” so that they could walk slowly back and forth in front of the clubs. I saw bewildered tourists of all ages and nationalities strolling the streets while promoters tried to lure them into their clubs. I was so angry. I felt a sudden urge to grab these promoters by the throat, but just as suddenly the Lord would take me back to my own slick, sophisticated days as a club promoter in New York, and I’d realize that except for God, I was no different from any of these guys. That revelation broke my heart.

I learned to give the situation over to the Lord in prayer, which was a good thing because laying down prayer cover was critical on this mission. I’d never sensed such a wretched, overwhelming power and oppression of the enemy anywhere else in my life, and never had prayer seemed so crucial to me. Someone had to clear a way through the enemy’s defenses for the girls on our team, and that could only be done through heroic prayer and intercession.

While in Bangkok, Dan and I teamed up in the streets as the girls headed into the clubs, and we spent hours each night prayer-walking the red-light district, warring in the spirit and walking our legs ragged. That was the one good thing about the Night Bazaar. It provided a perfect cover for prayer walking . . . Dan and I looked like we were tourists out on a stroll, talking to each other, when in fact we were audibly praying.

We spent our days at Rehab hearing from others on the team and meeting with the women we’d rescued the night before. What an amazing experience! First, God deepened my respect for women enough to trust me to go, and then He used these conversations to train me to respect and defend these daughters of Christ even more deeply.

 Finally, I’d become the missionary Helene hoped I would become, and God had me right where He wanted me—standing as a man, fighting battles, living an adventure, and defending His beauties, the abused, helpless, and humiliated of this world.

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